ZDNet's George Ou has once again weighed in on the the lie that is HD quality over the Internet, and I'm glad he has because I remember his piece from last year and I wanted to write on it then but never got around to it.

This comes up again on the heels of Apple's announcement of "HD" movies available for rent on the Apple TV - as George makes clear, these should not be labeled "HD", nor should similar "HD" rentals from Microsoft via Xbox Live. Sure, their resolution is 1280x720 which is technically 720p HD quality, the problem is that their bit-rates are so low they barely crack the quality of standard DVDs.

As George notes:

Standard definition 480i DVD movies are typically 5 to 8 mbps (megabits per second) MPEG-2 whereas these so-called HD wannabes weigh in at a pathetic 1.5 to 4 mbps of 720p H.264.

While using a superior compression technology - in this case h.264 rather than MPEG-2 - will help hide artifact problems a bit, when iTunes Movie Rentals' bit-rates are 4 Mbps while Blu-ray meanwhile has a bit-rate of 40 Mbps, there is clearly going to be a huge difference. "HD" video over directly over the web is even much worse, at only 1.5 Mbps - again, standard DVDs have a bit-rate of around 8 Mbps.

George thinks the public rhetoric about these "HD" services will fool people for a while, but when cheap, nice quality large screen 1080p televisions start hitting stores this year and more people start getting them, they should begin to notice the difference based on what formats they are watching. I have a 1080p television right now, and I know I can barely tell the difference between standard DVDs played on it versus "HD" downloads via Xbox Live. That is exactly why I still plan on getting a Blu-ray player on top of an Apple TV.

The "HD" label shouldn't just be about the resolution - it's about the bit-rate too. I know that I had no idea about that before reading George's original article even though I could definitely see with my own eyes something was up with regards to the more compressed formats. Maybe Microsoft and Apple should re-brand their "HD" as "Enhanced Definition" just as some below hi-def standard televisions used to have to do. It's going to be a long while before we have true HD video delivered over the Internet.