Does HD cable have the same quality as Blu-Ray movies?

Question

Are the HD movies you get at On Demand HD as good as the ones you get on Blu-Ray? i mean the video quality. and when you rent an HD movie in the xbox market place is the picture quality as good as the ones you get in Blu Ray? thanks!

Answer 1

sjburke is correct in his definition.

Answer 2

it depends but probably not. if you have a good blu ray hookup to an HD tv, you should get primo picture. the HD on demand movies in theory are just as good but the cable company may be compressing the signal to get it to your house where you cable box decompresses. A little quality is lost during that process. It may not even be enough for you to see the difference tho. Depends on your cable signal, your tv hookup etc. we watch hd cable movies all the time and they look pretty darn good. If you are really picky about it, blue ray may be a little better.

Answer 3

No Marketplace or On Demand comes close to the quality of Blu-ray.

Blu-ray has 48 Mbps for Audio and Video bandwidth. It uses MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and VC-1 for video compression.

HD marketplace/On Demand/Satellite/Cable, etc. - they all have around 19 Mbps and use MPEG-2.

MPEG-2 needs bandwidth to work well. There is a night and day difference - Blu-ray is substantially better. The additional bandwidth and more efficient encoders (AVC/MPEG-4 and VC-1) allow for less pixelation and macroblocking and far better sound - Blu-ray uses new dts-Master Audio, Dolby TrueHD and multi-channel uncompressed PCM, whereas HD broadcast is stuck with lossy Dolby Digital.