[Alphonse]

I've recently downloaded some Blu-ray rips encoded with H264 codec and which are in a Matroska envelope.

These rips are usually around 2.5GB in size, and have 5.1 audio, and are brilliant quality when played on my PC. I've ordered a DVI to HDMI cable to try connecting my PC to my HD plasma TV in the hope that the TV will show the files in HD or as near as possible to it. I don't have a Blu-ray player or Sky HD, and have yet to see HD on my TV.

My questions are these: Does anyone know how close the playback of the MKV file through the TV's HDMI will be to true HD? Will it even be true HD?

And if the PC will produce full HD or thereabouts (ie better than an SD upscaler at 1080) when showing a compressed Blu-ray rip, would Blu-ray die overnight if a manufacturer made the equivalent of an SD DVD DivX upscaler, but that had MKV/H264 codec support?

Nigel, are you there?

[Jarrak]

If Blu-ray died where would the source of all these rips comes from?
If you are going to rely on broadcast HD then the re-encodes are going to be crippled by the wildly varying source quality which ranges from pretty close to retail HD optical to looks even worse than upscaled DVD

While the mpeg4 codecs are maturing quickly as seen by SKY's move to lower bitrates with very few if any PQ issues it's a far cry from 2.5gig for a home PC version to a 10gig version take from the HD master.
I don't think studios would expect to sell an optical format at that specification so even if support for some of the more exotic encodes would appear on the DVD platform it would only be useful for pirated or home produced material.