Thomson's film grain for HD DVD: if you can't play it, fake it -- Mp4 Converter

With all this crazy money being spent on rolling out new standards like HD DVD and Blu-ray, you'd think at least they'd be able to manage that 1080p res they're soaking you for, right? Well, sort of. HD DVD runs at about 10-15Mbps, compared to SD-res bitrates of around 8-10Mbps. That means a whole lot of compression is going on, and some of that film grain that you're paying for with such high resolutions is getting lost in the process. Now Thomson is stepping in with a solution to reintroduce that grain, by simulating it in the actual player as a visual effect on the image. Sounds pretty cheesy to us, since the whole point of seeing film grain is for the subtle nuance of it, not for the mere effect of distorted picture. It does sound like they have some algorithm in place to pickup the actual patterns of noise during compression, so that the final representation has at least a semblance to the original, but it sounds like true film grain purists are going to have to stick with movie theaters for their fix for now.