Dont laugh! do blue ray dvd's and reg dvds play at the same speed?

Question

my gf and i live in different states so we have movie night over the phone. well i just bought a ps3 and it has blue ray dvd. i want to watch it on there but will there be a delay in one of the movies?

Answer 1

The two copies will play in-synch.  You won't have a problem with one version playing faster or anything like that.

Answer 2

There will be no difference in the speed of the movie.  Yours will just look and sound A LOT LOT better.

Answer 3

Yes they can be different.  For the most part Blue-ray and HD-DVD movies have a different digital master.  So while the digital master for HD movies will be very recent, the digital master for the SD movie may be quite a few years old.

In order to make digital masters, film negatives and sometimes film positives are gathered from different sources.  Some sources may have a few frames missing here and there. But it all adds up.  

This should not apply if the HD movies and SD movies were made from the same digital master (as is the case with newer HD an SD dvds), as they would both use the same HD digital master.  The SD version would just be converted down from 1080p

Answer 4

well, no because the blue ray is better and faster so they don't go at the same rate.

Answer 5

nope! PS3 plays the DVDs and Blu-rays faster. It also makes them look better.

Answer 6

This actually isn't a dumb question at all.

The frame rate on theatrical movies is standard at 24 frames per second (fps), TV (PAL format) is 25 fps, other TV formats range from 30 to 60 fps, so a bit of confusion on this is reasonable. In particular blue-ray can display progressive output which has different output fps than normal TV.

HOWEVER.... it isn't as complicated as all that.

The different frame rates going from movies to various TV formats are accomadated by various frame doubling strategies. Both movies should pass at the same speed.

Having said that, many studios actually change things up from format to format in order to suit their preferences on sound synchronization or pan-and-scan. The odds are that your sound won't be in sync at the end even if it matches perfectly at the beginning. The production company screens also won't match a lot of the time if the blue ray is more recent.

On a high quality movie released recently (so the DVD and blu-ray were mastered at the same time) the video and scenes should match pretty darn well, but the audio may wander. I think your plan should be fine as long as the TVs aren't so loud they interrupt the call.

As an aside I will say that I often notice the audio wandering away from the action by a significant fraction of a second on even high quality movies, but neither my mother nor my wife can perceive it. I blame my grad school video compression courses for making me aware of it.