Hi Neil,
Apparently - and this will allegedly get fixed in October - both HD DVD & Blu Ray are unusable in PAL framerates of 25p and 50i.
You simply cannot create the discs due to problems with the Grade Film Implementation.
Blu Ray will sort of deal with 50i, but the quality is crap by all accounts.
Neither format can deal with 25p - this should change with HDMI 1.3, but I am not holding my breath. Right now, it's a mess.
I don't think that the market for HD players for self-made HD material is very huge right now anywhere. Since the primary focus for the new HD media is playing pre-recorded discs with movies in the best possible quality, I think the lack of 50i and 25p support is not really the biggest issue.
Also, I don't know why HDMI1.3 should have anything to do with this. The only thing it adds picture-wise is the extended color space, and this is also a non-issue for pre-recorded movie discs.
What is more of an issue in Europe is the lack of 24p support! Movies are shot with 24 frames per second, and for converting this to the PAL standard, the movie is played back 4% faster (PAL speedup), which gives you smooth movements, but is not without its drawbacks. Usually - because of this - the audio has a higher pitch (approximately a half-tone), which for people who possess an absolute hearing can be quite annoying - so I'm told. There are DVDs where the pitch is adjusted, but the film is still played back faster than in the cinema.
In the US, the conversion to the 30i of the NTSC standard is done by a process called
3:2 Pulldown which leads to a slight stutter in zooms and pans. American audiences usually don't notice this - they have been conditioned to ignore these artifacts for many decades. But many European viewers pick up on this because they are used to smooth movements.
The PS3 actually can by now output the 24p signal, but you still need to have a display or projection system that can deal with this signal. This has nothing to do with HDMI1.3, an in fact there are such displays available which have only HDMI1.1 inputs. For the Toshiba XE1 HD DVD player a firmware upgrade was announced by Toshiba, but the original release date for this (mid July) was bumped to at least fall and possibly around Christmas.
There are many people to blame here! First of all the people who defined the HDTV standard in the first place, because they just were too caught in their own little world of television to even think of the necessities for a perfect reproduction of cinematic material! So the 24fps were never part of the original standard.
Then there are the (Japanese and American?) developers of HD DVD and Blu-ray who also never thought about this before they presented the finished products to the European market. There was an article in the "Audiovision", which is a leading German home theatre magazine. I tink it was Panasonics presentation of Blu-ray for the journalists in Germany (or Europe?). I guess they were expecting aaahhhs and ooohhs from the journalists. Instead they were asked about the motion studder and what they were going to do about it. The guys doing the presentation were seemingly caught completely off-guard and uncomprenedingly asked the journalists if they though that this was really an issue and if this would matter...
So, short of Pioneer who built in the 24p capability in their HD displays early on, none of the big companies gave a second though about this before the European home theatre press made a fuss about it.
Having said all that, as someone who owns hundreds of Region 1 NTSC DVDs, I am also not really that bothered by this effect and I can really enjoy watching an HD DVD in all its full HD glory!
Best regards,
Oliver
P.S.: I almost forgot: at least when it comes to the German market, I think the main problem is the lackluster support by the DVD stores (HD DVDs and Blu-rays are outrageously priced almost everywhere) and the content industry (there are far fewer titles available here than in the US and release dates get bumped all the time, which for me is a reason that I started with HD DVD, which has no regional coding; for Blu-ray I would have to get a player from the US; if they would drop that stupid regional codin altogether, I would buy a Blu-ray player before you can say "Quadraphonic").
