High Definition on DVD

Dem Pyros · Member Joined: 28 Jul 2006 Location: United States

I have a poorly bought HD-DVD player, but no HD DVD burner (or other drive, for that matter). What I'm wondering is this: Is it possible to burn high definition media onto a conventional DVD and play it back in an HD-DVD player?

paulw · Member Joined: 11 May 2001 Location: New Zealand

I have a feeling that Ulead Videostudio can do this but Ulead and Corel webs sites appear dead at the moment..

www.ulead.com

Baldrick · Administrator Joined: 09 Aug 2000 Location: Sweden

Or Ulead DVD Workshop or Nerovision . But it may not work on all hd dvd players.

jman98 · Member Joined: 08 Oct 2004 Location: Freedonia

Yes, Ulead DVDMovieFactory 6 can create HD DVDs that Toshiba HD DVD players will play. I have personally tested this. I own a Toshiba HD DVD player and I have created my own HD DVDs from HD Tv captures that work on the player. I've burned to both single layer and dual layer DVD discs and both worked.

There are downsides. Ulead only creates HD DVDs from MPEG-2 video source. That's fine for HD TV captures, but if your source is something else like VC-1 or H.264, it will re-encode it. That's bad. VERY BAD. Ulead's encoder is awful. It also only allows for LPCM or AC3 audio. Again, not necessarily a bad thing depending on your source, but the spec does allow for DTS. Ulead does not support that.

If you want to do this, you'll need some special software because many 1080i/p sources must have their headers patched or Ulead will to try to re-encode this. I have never made an HD DVD from anything but 1080i TV captures. In theory it's possible to make them from 720p captures, but I seem to recall that Ulead doesn't make that easy at all. I haven't tried this yet out of laziness.

So you can see that while Ulead can do this, it is extremely limited in what it supports. It supports only a subset of what the format allows. If you really want to do this, send me a private message. I have a link on another PC that I saved where it shows where you can get 2 freeware tools that you'll need if you are going to try to use Ulead to make HD DVDs or Ulead will just re-encode everything you give it and you won't like that at all. It's encoder is horrible. Anyway, you'll want me to send you the link. I can't get to it right now, so if you send me a PM about it, I'll look it up later and send the link to you.

Dem Pyros · Member Joined: 28 Jul 2006 Location: United States

festmaster · Member 1st Class Joined: 16 Aug 2004 Location: Charlotte

Here is a link to a guide on the AVS forum that spells out the whole procedure. I haven't tried it myself but plan to within the next few days.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=705146
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ticos2000 · Posted: May 08, 2008 06:44

Yes indeed you can do that straight forward just burn the MTS files (be sure you change the extension file as MPEG) using nero or whatever burner software you have (just change to UDF 2.5) and youll be able to play DVD disc with HD content on a bluray player. I have sony bdp-s1 and the files play flawlessly. If you need menus and authoring you will need DVDit pro.

best regards

RickA · Member Joined: 22 Nov 2007 Location: United States

Greets,

You sure can. Some guys on another forum and jdobbs author of the great program DVD-RB are discussing that here http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=135335 . It starts out as wanting to put several SD DVD's onto a blu-ray disc. Then morphs into putting blu-ray HD content onto a SD DVD in blu-ray format to play back on a blu-ray player. A very interesting idea.

Cheers,
Rick
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jman98 · Member Joined: 08 Oct 2004 Location: Freedonia

Nelson37 · Member Joined: 14 Aug 2001

How about h264 on DVD? This looks like it would be the best option. One thing that is confusing me is that DVD play times quoted seem to be about the same for MPG-2 and h264, and/or AVCHD? I thought h264 was so much more efficient?

Authoring/burning tools extremely limited, but if it was easy, what would be the fun in that?

Recent xbox360 updates may play h264 from internal drive, both blu-ray (PS3) and HD-DVD standalone (ok, I bought one, it was cheap and it upsamples) support this on DVD.

So if we take 1920x1080i MPG2 content and re-encode to 1440x720p in h264, is this VCD-HD? HDSVCD

How standardized can we get, and what's out playback options, while retaining DVD (DL)?

jman98 · Member Joined: 08 Oct 2004 Location: Freedonia

it is theoretically possible to burn H.264 video to HD DVD format on DVD-5 or DVD-9 discs, but the problem is that ONLY a few older versions of Sonic Scenarist might be able to generate such discs. Ulead will re-encode the video. Scenarist costs a fortune unless you are able to acquire it through, ahem, "other means".

[_chef_] · Member Joined: 13 Nov 2002 Location: Germany

H.264 on DVD5 or DVD9 is a good choice actually, using ps3 or htpc as a player.
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Nelson37 · Member Joined: 14 Aug 2001

I just did my first large h264 encode, and HOLY CRAP x2.

First, I started on my old Athlon 3000. After running overnite, it still had a day or so to go, not sure which pass I was on. Holy Crap #1.

Ok, on to the 3 gig core 2. Much better, still overnite but done.

Now I started with a 5gb, 1920x1080i, 54 minute MPG2 clip from PBS, a special on the Hood and Bismarck. Original target was 4 gb, to fit it on a DVD. I must have left off a zero, the resulting file was only 400MB, with no sound as there was a minor issue there. H264, no resize, just a deinterlace, some issue with hints on a color matrix, solve these later.

So I opened this file expecting a badly pixelated mess. Holy Crap #2, it ain't ugly. Still need to do detailed analysis and playback on the big screen, but I am impressed. I expected something like a crappy VCD, but this is WAY better than that.

Again I haven't watched more than a few minutes but I'm seeing only a slight loss of sharpness and some minor pixelation, no macroblocks, newspaper text on-screen I could read without my glasses and that got my attention. Lots of ocean scenes, explosions, waves and spray, looked amazingly good.

HD-VCD looks like a real possibility, getting it to play on something .......

pentode · Member Joined: 17 Mar 2008 Location: United Kingdom

Hi Guys, i am creating blu-ray file sets and burning to dvd and these are from mkv and ts files. i use tsmuxer to generate the file set, it does not re-encode. the only probs i have are with the data rate transfer from dvd, its not as high as br discs so you have to watch the data rate of the source file. i have a samsung 1400 and would like to know how others are playing "mini br discs". 720p by the way.
i have just finished five programs for my m8 razor (yes thats his nick name ). he has cable hd and had recorded these 5 progs then his box started acting up cable reformated his hd box drive and oops no progs any more so the internet is the only way to really archive your fav progies
so if any one has also done this how does your player get on with the data rate.

festmaster · Member 1st Class Joined: 16 Aug 2004 Location: Charlotte

I finally made a stab using the AVS forum instructions I linked to above and was shocked to have success on my first try, and shocked that it did not take that much time. I recorded an episode of The Office OTA with my HD capture card, cleaned out the commercials with VideoReDo, authored an HD-DVD with Ulead and burned the results to DVD-R. It worked perfectly. The time to analyze and clean-up with VideoReDo took about 20 minutes and t''llhe authoring took another 20 minutes.

I'll be doing this again.
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jman98 · Member Joined: 08 Oct 2004 Location: Freedonia

This is mostly for those who in the future might stumble across this thread.

festmaster - Yes, making an HD DVD from 1080i source is no problem. I've done the same as you with The Office and my Toshiba A-30 plays them with no problems. However, if you have 720p source, I haven't been able to make a HD DVD yet that the Toshiba will play. PowerDVD plays them fine using the HD DVD settings, but my A-30 starts to load the disc, recognizes it as HD DVD and then tells me something like "Cannot play. Not DVD format."

I had to use the patch method described at AVS to get Ulead to accept 720p input and then patch the files it created to get it back to 720p. My best guess at this time is that the idiots at Toshiba did not follow the HD DVD standards that they created and their players are unable to recognize 720p as valid for HD DVD. I only know of one commercial HD DVD that was made at 720p and it's a German made one. I'm not sure that I'm going to spend the money to buy it, if I even can, just to test this. So my best guess at this time is that Toshiba's own players do not fully support the HD DVD spec. I have one more idea that I can try to create an HD DVD using 720p input, but it's going to take a while to do it. If I have any success with that method, I will post here later about it. But at this time it does seem that only 1080i input works to create HD DVD on burnable DVD discs. 1080p might work, but I don't have such sources to test.

festmaster · Member 1st Class Joined: 16 Aug 2004 Location: Charlotte

jman98- Both VideoReDo and Ulead have been updated since the original AVS forum instructions were posted. You no longer need to use the patch utility. I just prepared an HD-DVD on DVD-R from an OTA capture of Narnia from two weeks ago on ABC, which is 720p. Ulead didn't try to re-encode and authored the first disk in 7 minutes. My Toshiba HD-A3 had no problem with the result.
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dwisniski · Member Joined: 06 Apr 2002 Location: Florence, NJ

[_chef_] · Member Joined: 13 Nov 2002 Location: Germany

jman98 · Member Joined: 08 Oct 2004 Location: Freedonia

festmaster - Thanks for the info on Ulead. I'll have to check for an update.

I'm not sure it's worth buying another HD DVD player just because Toshiba was too stupid to make the A-30 do what it's supposed to do.

Nelson37 · Member Joined: 14 Aug 2001

The Ulead "HD Powerpack" is supposed to allow h264 content, authored to DVD, for HD-DVD players Found some minimal info on this, one point being that you had to use H264info to pulldown to 29.97 fps.

I've made HD MP4 DVD that play on the Xbox360, but it only supports stereo, no 5.1.

My Toshiba A-30 is getting lonely still sitting in the box, I really need an excuse to unpack the sucker. Have made some HD-DVD with MPG2 content, but size restrictions point to H264 as the way to go. A $300 BlueRay player is just not going to happen anytime soon.

Anybody got any results or info on H264 on DVD for the HD-DVD player?

jman98 · Member Joined: 08 Oct 2004 Location: Freedonia

I gave up on Ulead for a variety of reasons. I got a copy of Scenarist, which I am already familiar with for DVD authoring, that can author HD DVDs. I just started using that. Less b.s. to deal with than Ulead.

Scenarist will accept H.264 video for HD DVD, but whatever format (MPEG-2, H.264, VC-1) you use, you must remember these rules.
1) 1080i/p video must be at NTSC or PAL frame rates - 25 fps or 29.97. I had to put a pulldown flag in 24 fps video to make it look like 29.97 to get Scenarist to take it. Ulead is no different from my experience.
2) 720p video (or 480i/p if you use that) MUST WITHOUT EXCEPTION be either 59.94 fps or 50 fps. Some sources hint or say that 720p can be 24 fps and Scenarist absolutely in no circumstances will accept this.
3) It's best to just stick to AC3 audio at 448 Kbps or less. Scenarist is awfully picky about audio. It won't let you use DTS unless you also have AC3. It won't accept AC3 at bit rates higher than 448. There are no freeware applications to encode to DD+, so we're stuck with AC3 for audio. Given that DVD-9 is kind of small for HD DVD content anyway, using this for audio does save space you can make better use of for video anyway. Ulead is no different here.

My main PC at present is too weak for me to encode to H.264. I have been encoding to MPEG-2 because I can do that rather easily and authoring from that. I have several HD DVDs that I converted from MKV files and they play fine on my player. If I had a faster PC, I would try H.264 encoding.

DVD Master · Member Joined: 02 Aug 2001

jagabo · Member Joined: 09 Dec 2005 Location: none