In reply to:
Bren, you said that the dvds we are stuck with now are single sided, single layer discs. Actually most retail DVDs these days are single sided, Double layer discs.
Most of the new blockbusters are dual-layers, I just looked through my collection and ones like X-Men 1.5/Spiderman/Final Fantasy are SSDL, but other older movies (released on DVD) are SSSL. That's almost worse, really... bitrates for the movie itself seem nearly identical, they just pack the 4000 extra minutes of bonus footage/animated menus/easter eggs onto the other half of the capacity and compress at the same bitrate. I admit, some are better than others (tossing the schlock onto a different disc for instance).
In reply to:
Also, I've read that DVDs now use MPEG4 compression.
There are DVD players that play back MPEG4 videos and DiVX encoded video, but consumer DVDs, since they have to be backwards compatible with all players, still carry all video as MPEG2.
Bren R.
