What audio and video format has the best quality?

What is the best video format on 1080p to watch without lossing ANY of the quality?

• I have the playstation 3 and i played 2 of my "blu-ray" disks and one i got mpeg-2 and the other AVC. now regardless of the playstation what is the best video format out there? without lossing any of the quality of the video itself?

• Answer:

  You have to understand that all of them are lossy video compression formats. Here's why (this is just a quick "open your eyes" example) But take your time to read and understand or just jump to the conclusion ahead. 1080p resolution is 1920 x 1080 pixels. 1920 x 1080 = 2073600 pixels per frame let's suppose a true 24-bit color resolution (minimum required for true color reproduction on today's PC) Then 2073600 x 24 = 49766400 bits per frame 24 fps is minimum frame count per second used for film. Then 49766400 x 24 = 1194393600 bits / sec of movie. a movie is about 100 minutes (6000 seconds) Then 1194393600 x 6000 = 7166361600000 bits per movie 1 byte = 8 bits Then 7166361600000 / 8 = 895795200000 bytes per movie 1 kb = 1024 bytes Then 895795200000 / 1024 = 874800000 kb per movie 1 Mb = 1024 kb Then 874800000 / 1024 = 854297 Mb per movie 1Gb = 1024 Mb Then 854296 / 1024 = 835 Gb per movie --------CONCLUSION----------- We will need 835 Gb of disc space just to store the full HD 1080p at 24 fps video info with no loss (and without including audio or aditional features, not even menus in there) But wait a minute....Bluray discs hold up to 50 Gb and HD-DVD up to 30 Gb... How do they fit a 835 Gb movie with 7.1 audio, menus and additional features on that space? Well....using those MPEG-2 or AVC compression formats, they take away some redundant info per frames and chrominance info per pixel that human eye will not notice to save space. They work the same as the JPEG format used to compress a BMP image or MP3 used to compress CD music. On your computer those formats use 10 to 20 times less disc space than the original. Of course with quality lost. But not all the compression depends on lost quality. They take out first some redundant info to save space. We can use 18 characters (18 bytes) to store this info: "aaaaaaaabbbbcccccc" This is our uncompressed format. Now we can use 6 characters (6 bytes) with a codec to store the same info: "8a4b6c" then use the codec again to decode the info: "aaaaaaaabbbbcccccc" So here we achieved a 66% of saved storage space without quality lost (the info remains complete). For video then complex algorithms are used. So given that MPEG-4 / AVC is a newer codec that MPEG-2 maybe it uses more efficient algorithms and this could result on a slightly better image. But given the large compression rate I think this will be subtle. There are actually other stuff more important to the final video quality like the quality of masters used and final transfer quality because from film to video special scanners are used and they can vary in quality and scanned resolution. So this is why you will find movies that look better than others. So at the end we have always quality lost on movie transfers to video no matter that we have HDTV now. Cinema will always be ahead of TV.