The time may come where you will have to burn both a Blu-Ray disc for your family, and an HD-DVD disc for your boss who got hurried out and bought that HD-DVD player just so he can show off to all of you who waited for the format war outcome. Besides, while the HD format war is over, there are still over 1.3 million HD-DVD devices out there. I have modified some HD authoring methods found on the net in a way that 80% of the work to be done is the same for both formats, and with the rest 20% of the work only taking an additional 10 minutes for each format to be muxed and burned. Blu-Ray method is here, and the HD-DVD method is here (methods are identical up to step #7). Not only that, but you won’t even need an HD burner, as these methods exercise plain DVD-R discs and they are using freeware tools.
Create Both HD-DVD & Blu-Ray HD on Plain DVD-R Discs
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
These are nice guides…
But what I REALLY wanted was a HD-DVD and BluRay compatible HD format title…
okay, okay… enough with dreams… =]
It is not possible unfortunately. You might get lucky though if you follow the HD-DVD guide and export at 720p instead of 1080i. *Some* Blu-Ray players might be able to playback a 720p stream burned in a DVD format as described in the HD-DVD tutorial. But this is not for sure…
This 80% similarity described on both tutorials, with a 10 minutes of extra work for each format, is possibly the closest we can come to a common format.
Edited 2008-02-23 12:08 UTC
Thank you for the process Eugenia. Although I may give this a try at some point, I will probably wait for a Blu-Ray specific burner to become available at a reasonable price instead. I have Vegas Pro 8 already and convenience is the name of the game after all that editing, but your efforts do _not_ go unnoticed!
Actually blu-ray RW drives are relatively cheap, around 250 Euros for the LG GGW – H20L which can write DL blu-ray disks, the problem is that the DL disks (50GB) cost about 30 Euros !!!
Hopefully now blu-ray products will become much more popular and their prices will fall.
Which brightly illustrates the problem with Sony et al owning the media format and the player technology. They’re going to keep recordable media prices high, in order to take a bite out of the inevitable piracy which they know will emerge. BR discs cost about $1.20 per gig. At those prices, everyone would probably be better off storing their HD content on magnetic media rather than BR discs. 1 terabyte of storage costs a little over $200 now. That’s $0.20 per gig. Clearly, unless Sony gets realistic about the price of media, people will start getting their HD content delivered online, directly to hard drives, rather than invest in overpriced BR-R discs.
Have you considered that maybe they just don’t want to sell those dics on loss. Replicating a BR discs costs at least $5 in large batches and doing recordable discs is much more expensive and batches smaller. The license fees for writable BR’s aren’t very high so the prices will come down once there is enough buyers and manufacturers doing those.
By the way, if you want to do some BR discs, Sony isn’t the place to go. MPEG LA handles all licensing on non-discrimanatory basis.
Edited 2008-02-23 19:11 UTC
I guess you won’t be fitting very much HD content on a regular DVD, but it’s an interesting concept.
Depending how much bitrate you give to the mpeg2/ac3 streams, you can fit from 20 minutes to 40 minutes.
If you look at the scene… You’ll see that there’s enough space for medium-high quality 80-90min 720p streams into a DVD9 (DVD+/-DL)… just don’t dream with DTS, TrueHD or anything like that… and that’s only re-encodes! (every single one from optical sources are better than any HDTV stream you can watch in your TV or download from online stores…)
…and if you have an animation (2D ou 3D) you produced, you can easily fit in standard DVD5 too… (even 1080p)
So, if you are looking into how to show you HD portfolio, you don’t need and BluRay/HD-DVD recorder… you just need quality HD stuff you captures you produced, the better the original source (true HD cams instead some that just resize the output to hi-rez; good cameras that don’t put too much grain into low-lightning situations, etc), the better the final encode will be. This is way more important than the space available in the media)
Blueray supports VC9 so why not just encode to that?
Because mpeg2 encoders and utilities that work with it are in abandance. VC1 footage would not work with these utilities, especially in the HD-DVD case. And this is what we try to do: a method that is similar for both formats that works easily with the freeware utilities.
Your method requires Windows which is hardly freeware. 😉
Yeah, but it ain’t matter, because 95% of the users have that anyway.
And most DVD recorders (at least here in Europe) bundle Nero. So what’s your argument for avoiding Nero?
Wow, someone is wrong on the internet!
Look, Nero does not have more than 20%-30% penetration, Windows has 95%. I don’t have Nero, and most people don’t even buy recorders alone, they buy PCs. And at least the DELL PCs don’t come with Nero bundled.
So that’s why I don’t use Nero. As for Windows, it is a given. If you don’t have Windows you can’t run most of these utilities that run only on Windows anyway, so that’s your problem, not the rest 95%’s.
So please drop this silly, off topic discussion. If you don’t like the tutorial and the 4 hours I spent on it, then don’t bloody use it.
I appreciate the time and effort it took for you to create the tutorial.
Given the large number of creatives that do work on other platforms (ie, OSX), could you point us in a direction or is there a source for us to research.
I realize that DVD Studio will author HD-DVD (Apple needs to get an update out I think), but are there other applications that you know of.
Thanks.
Thanks for the comment.
There are no free utilities that can do the re/muxing stuff on OSX/Linux, so unless you buy a commercial solution, you can’t do these things for free on these OSes. I am sure that overtime these abilities will be introduced, but for now it’s not possible.
BluRay and HD-DVD only support MPEG-2, AVC/h.264, and VC-1. Not VC-9 (I think you mean VC-1).
If a more modern codec was used, it would obviously be AVC, because AVC has independent codec implementations among which is an excellent free encoder (x264). VC-1, OTOH, has only an encoder from Microsoft. From my observations AVC is also less resource hungry.
Thanks for the guide but I can capture H.264 video with AC-3 audio as an MPEG2-TS stream. I would like to avoid transcoding the video to MPEG-2 to play back on the HD-DVD player. Is there a way package H.264/AC-3 such that HD-DVD can play it? (Toshiba A30 owner). Both H.264 abd AC-3 are supported on the A30. Is there a way to create a H.264/AC-3 VOB and burn it to a DVD-R?
Thanks.
-Dinesh
No, this is not possible for the HD-DVD method, because DVDAuthorGUI requires a tagged mpeg2 stream in order to work. You need to replace step 9 with another app that creates HD-DVD folders instead of DVD folders if you want to keep using h.264 unchanged, and as far as I know, there is no freeware app that does that yet.