Tech Talk

Blu-ray porn – are we there yet?

Filed under Tech Talk :: Posted on May 9 2008

After buying a PlayStation 3 back in January, my Blu-ray movie collection has been growing steadily. On a HDTV of a decent size, the quality of good Blu-ray transfer is in an entirely different league than DVD, which of course it should be, otherwise this whole HD craze would just be a major marketing gimmick (ehh… alright, I guess that technically we couldn’t entirely put such a stunt past Hollywood and the electronics companies, but fortunately hi-def really does deliver on its promises).

But what about Blu-ray porn then? At this time I’ve reviewed a fairly decent selection of sites offering downloadable HD porn videos (check out my Technology Leaders list), but as I mentioned in my previous blog post about HD porn the modest typically 4000 kbit (occasionally 5-8000) bitrate really doesn’t fare entirely well when you decide to view your downloaded porn on your large HDTV, rather than a typical 17-22″ PC monitor.
Sure, it certainly looks decent enough, but it’s lacking that remarkable clarity and abundance of fine detail you get with Blu-ray movies, which tops out a bitrate ten times higher than those 4000 kbit used on downloadable porn.

So what do those of us more or less obsessed with video quality do to get our real HD porn fix? Well, frankly not a whole lot just yet. I’ve been around the net looking for Blu-ray porn, and the selection is still extremely slim – although now that Blu-ray has recently won the HD format war over HD DVD, hopefully it won’t be too long before we’ll see a number of large porn studios releasing Blu-ray porn. Quite a few have no doubt been shooting in HD for a while – now they just need to make the same move for the rest of their production (alongside regular DVD releases of course, those aren’t going anywhere for years).

For those of you who want to join the very early adopters, Digital Playground currently has 15 Blu-ray porn releases, which can be ordered directly from their site. Here’s a direct link to their Blu-ray page.

You can also find many (if you can really use that word about such a limited collection) of their releases – plus some from a few other studios – in some of the large adult online shops, including (again direct Blu-ray links) GameLink and The Sex Superstore.

One final note though, until I’ve actually gotten my hands on a few Blu-ray porn movies (ordering overseas can sometimes be a bitch – both in terms of delivery times and customs, but I’ll probably see if I can find a European online store carrying them – or wait till later this year when things are hopefully starting to move forward), I really can’t say for sure how good the video quality is likely to be.
As I mentioned in my previous HD related post, for obvious reasons I’m certainly not expecting porn studios to have quite the same facilities and equipment as a Hollywood studio, but I don’t see any reason why they would have skimped on the bitrate and not offered the best quality they possibly could.
So overall, for large screens I very much expect Blu-ray porn to offer a quality that’s superior to even the best looking downloadable HD porn.
But I guess I’ll find out soon enough.

HD Porn – not just on your PC monitor

Filed under Tech Talk :: Posted on March 10 2008

In January I finally got my 15-year old, inherited, 25″ Phillips TV replaced with a shiny new 40″ 1080p Samsung HDTV, which obviously meant it was time to try to watch a few… alright, a lot then, of the hundreds of porn movies on my harddisks, on a screen a bit larger than my usual small(ish) 22″ and 19″ PC monitors.

Fortunately the Playstation 3 I had bought together with my new TV was up for the task of wirelessly streaming video from my PC – after some messing around with Windows Media Sharing and assorted folders on the latter.
Well, it was sort of up for the task anyway. Even though WMV and DivX are both supported formats, the PS3 didn’t really like files in those formats from certain sites, including unfortunately my favourite source of hardcore porn, VideoBox, and it wouldn’t chew through the DivX (or more recent mp4) files from Club Sandy and Pix & Video either.
And the whole streaming thing really didn’t work particularly well either with high resolution videos, presumably because of the somewhat limited bandwidth of a wireless connection (both my PC and my PS3 are connected wirelessly) – it was more like watching an extremely jerky slideshow when I tried my luck with videos over a certain resolution and bit rate.
Good thing then that it’s possible to copy the video files over to the PS3 harddrive – or when you run out of space, buy an external USB harddrive, hook it up to your PC and shove your entire porn collection onto it and then proceed to plug it into the PS3.

Worth mentioning though, is that the other day (I originally wrote most of the text for this post a couple of weeks ago) I actually found an alternative to Windows Media Sharing – TVersity – that not only has proved able to handle streaming of 720p, 4000 kbit videos without any stuttering, but also – thanks to using the PC rather than the PS3 for video “transcoding” as they call it – has allowed me to stream pretty much any format, including those VideoBox WMV files I complained about above as well as the DivX and mp4 files from Club Sandy and Pix & Video.
TVersity is also less resource hungry on the PC side than Windows Media Sharing, and overall faster and more responsive when I’m browsing video/photo folders from my PS3.
So if you’re looking for a media server, I definately recommend taking a look at TVersity. As a nice bonus it’s entirely free of charge – though potentially a bit tricky to set up correctly if you skip through the documentation a bit too fast.

Alright then, so don’t go in expecting to actually watch any porn for a couple of hours the first time you try this out, but at least most of this only has to be done once and then you (almost) just have to hit “play” the next time.

But how was the quality on a screen around or more than twice as large as a typical PC monitor? Well, just like when you’re watching video on one of the latter, that obviously depends on the resolution and bit rate of the videos in question.
Some of the 4:3 format videos (black bars at the sides, I don’t like the stretched format I’ve seen many people use on 4:3 broadcasts/video, just to fill up an entire 16:9 widescreen TV) I tried in 640×480, 1500+ kbit actually didn’t look too bad even on such a large screen – though obviously the image was blurry and lacked in detail.
Next step up was the uncommon but generally very good looking 960×540, 2000 kbit widesceen format from my favourite lesbian site, Sapphic Erotica, and now we’re really getting somewhere. Yes, the relatively low bit rate (comparatively, when we’re talking about DVD/HD movies and not just Internet porn) meant these videos aren’t exactly ultra sharp either, but they really do look great, and obviously all the more impressive as they are filling up the TV with their 16:9 format.

And then the ultimate test – downloaded HD porn (you can see a full list of the HD video sites I’ve reviewed here).
Now obviously current bandwidth limitations mean rather severe comprimises on bit rate, typically 4000 kbit vs. a staggering 20-40.000 variable bit rate on Hollywood Blu-ray movies (somewhat less on HD broadcasts, and 9.800 kbit, 720×576/480, on regular DVD), and with so far a couple of exceptions, 720p HD format rather than 1080p, although this last part shouldn’t make the biggest difference, particularly since most of the HDTVs in the living rooms out there only support 720p anyway.

What this ends up meaning in practical application, is that the 720p HD porn videos I’ve been watching on my 22″ widescreen monitor, thinking “fuck, that looks unbelievable”, fare somewhat worse on that 40″ HDTV.
Alright, they still look pretty great, but now that I’ve had the option of comparing them (somewhat unfairly, thanks to the lower bitrate plus the fact that I rather doubt many porn studios have Hollywood or broadcast level equipment) against proper HD on Blu-ray movies and broadcast channels like Discovery HD and a few European HD movie channels, it’s quite obvious that downloadable HD porn – and from what I’ve read, even digital delivery of regular HD movies – only barely qualifies for the “high definition” label.
The resolution (1280×720 or in a few cases 1920×1080) is up to standards, but Internet speeds in general aren’t up for the task of delivering both high resolution and high bit rate video just yet, and that means the incredible sharpness and detail level that defines HD (Blu-ray, broadcasts and the recently defunct HD DVD) just isn’t there.

But of course this doesn’t in any way impact the fact that those 1280×720, 4000+ kbit HD videos we’re seeing on an increasing number of porn sites still look significantly better than all the rest out there – and are well worth watching on a large HDTV if you’ve got a PS3, XBox 360, Windows Media Center Extender (set-top box), some other media server solution or your PC connected directly to your TV.
And even porn in lower quality can certainly benefit from a large screen.