HD Trek
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Uncategorized on
Next week sees the arrival of the remastered original Star Trek series on HD DVD. We saw a check disk of it a while back, and were astounded at the quality of those 1960s images. You could see the patterns in the mesh of Spock’s space suit in a scene set in a frozen scientific outpost, surrounded by dead showroom dummies.
HD video is starting to go where no man has gone before on its own. We wrote back in May about the plan to place HD cameras a mile or so down below the surface of the Pacific, monitoring black smokers - and delivering the live imagery over the LambdaGrid high-speed academic network (which sadly failed to agree merger terms with Internet2 earlier this week).
Now it’s in space too, as the Japanese KAGUYA (which translates as Selene) lunar orbiter is carrying one of the first space-rated HDTV cameras. The probe is still in shakedown, but has started sending back some spectacular imagery.
JAXA, the Japanese space agency, has turned some of the imagery into two rather wonderful movies - one of Earthrise, and one of Earthset.
We’ve grown up with grainy episodes of Star Trek and even grainier Apollo television pictures, It’s good to finally get a HD look at another world for the first time - whether it’s a mile below the ocean, or a quarter of a million miles away, orbiting a hunk of rock…
HD’s on its way to the Internet, too. Microsoft’s Silverlight supports HD codecs, and Flash will soon join the HD scene (just in time for YouTube to decide one way or the other). It’s also on the way to the familiar DIVX video codec, as the San Diego company just bought a German codec development house that specialises in H. 264. Whether we’re using Silverlight, Flash or DIVX it looks certain that we’ll be looking at some form of HD video.If only we had the bandwidth to deliver it to the home…
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