H.264/MPEG-4 AVC On Toshiba HD-A30

[hddvd2]

I have a Toshiba HD-A30 and some files encoded with the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC codecs. The problem is that they are in the AVI container. Is there any way at all that will allow me to play these file on the HD-A30. I have tried burning them to a dvd but it cant play any. Thanks for any help

[Baldrick]

I think you have to make/author a hd-dvd on a dvdr, probably easiest with ulead dvd moviefactory.

And check the avsforum, http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=939615 .

[camprod]

First, I want to say thank you to this site. I have read it and learned from it for many years now, but this is my first time posting.

The sort of thing hddvd2 is trying to do took me 6 months figure out and to do successfully. Ulead Movie Factory 6 Plus does not work even with the extra HD plugin when it comes to H.264 on HD-DVD. (It odes work for BD though.) The only program that has worked for me is Nero 8 (Vision application) with their HD plugin. Here is what else I learned using a Toshiba HD-A2 as a test player.

- The players will only spin DVD-Rs at high speed. To decode at a rate higher than DVD standard (8000 kb/s), the player needs to spin the disc faster than it would with DVD. So with DVD+Rs (and DVD+Rs bitchanged to read as DVD-ROMs), the players will spin at normal speed and the video skips regardless of media brand because the data is not physically available upon demand. I can only guess that this limitation has something to do with the official DVD forum.

- Nero has a minimum H.264 (AVC) encode rate that is unnecessarily high (13000 I think). But the program will successfully import files with lower bitrates. (Microsoft's VC-1 1080p samples have bitrates of only 8000).

- DVD-R DL can be used too (but not DVD+R DL). I professionally produced a 110 minute wedding mini-HD-DVD onto one of these using MPEG-2 at 1440x1080 and 10000 kb/s and it looked great.

- If you are running XP on your computer, you will need to download and install a UDF 2.5 reader, known on the internet as an XBOX360 HDDVDROM UDF reader if you expect the computer to recognize what you just burned.

[jman98]

First of all, the HD A30 will never play AVI container files. Never. It plays DVDs, audio CDs and HD DVDs and that is all. That means you have to convert anything else to one of those formats for this player to play it.

Secondly, this player CAN play HD DVDs produced by Ulead DVD MovieFactory 6 Plus with the HD DVD plugin. However, you need to look at:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=705146
There are 2 programs listed there that you will need. In many cases if you don't patch your video, Ulead will stupidly re-encode it. You don't want this. I have 3 or 4 HD DVDs that I made with Ulead, including one DVD+R DL disc, and they all play fine. I can't say about the older HD-A2, but the HD A30 can definitely spin single and dual layer DVDs fast enough for HD DVD. Note though that Ulead only produces HD DVDs in MPEG-2 video format regardless of the input. If your input is anything else (including H.264 and VC-1), it will surely try to re-encode it to MPEG-2. Their encoder sucks, so you don't want that to happen. Whether Nero Vision can make HD DVDs from H.264 and VC-1 without re-encoding, I don't know, but from this post it would seem that maybe it does.