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Does anybody know how large the capacity is for either HD-DVD discs and Blu-ray that are being sold now? Is it single layer?

Also how big are the respective movie files? I would guess only about 15GB max but thats just a guess.

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Can the discs be ripped with Decrypter and AnyDVD? Not that it really matters since there are no burners.

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Seriously, let?s get down to numbers. We are talking about LOTR EE which clocks at 223 or shy-4 hours. Now let?s talk about audio. Here, let?s be realistic folks. There is no 96 Khz soundtrack. The only thing that exists (now and in the future) is 48Khz/24-bit (and I doubt it really has 24-bit of resolution but let?s put that aside for now). Any 96Khz soundtrack would have to be artificially generated in a mixing house so it won?t have more resolution or fidelity. Someone else can correct me but older movies are unlikely to have surround sounds at full frequency and response. If so, they can compress much, much better than numbers I use below.

Now, if we are going with a lossless track, then I hope everyone accepts that the secondary track for backward compatibility can be some sort of DD+/DTS at 640Kbps or thereabouts. Let?s put all of this together.

At 12 Mbit/sec for VC-1, video uses 20.1 Gigabytes.
Lossless track, using Dolby?s TrueHD average compression rate of 2.4 (per Dolby experts at Home Theater Cruise talk), gives us 4.1 Gigabytes.
Lossy audio track uses 1.1 gigabytes.
Total = 20.1+4.1+1.1 = 25.2 Gigabytes

Doing the math for VC-1 at 15 Mbit/sec, pushes the total to 30 Gigabytes.

So now the question becomes, what kind of quality you can get out of VC-1 at 12-15 Mbit/sec. Our experience is that with our latest encoders and cleaner film stock (which LOTR falls into), we are getting incredible picture quality at just 10 Mbit/sec. Yes, 10 Mbit/sec. Indeed, one of the titles people talk about here all the time, will soon be released at 12 Mbit/sec, but the 10 Mbit/sec version looks just as good.

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