Making HDDVD on DVD D/L

[pglock]

Has anyone tried making HD movies on 'normal' dvd's?

DVDSP4 seems to have a way of doing this, just wondering if any of the current tools (ffmpegx etc) can author in a similar way.

I have QT7 Pro and all the usual free/inexpensive tools on my mac.

Comments?

[willrob]

Creating a DVD implies translating the files into MPEG. Right now there is no HD DVD standard. Apple has touted HD compatability for their new line up of G5s, but all one can do, for now—until a HD DVD standard, media and writer is created—is save a Video_TS folder to your hard drive and watch the "DVD" from there. But they stress it takes a dual G5's processing power—and lots of disc space, since HD files are a magnitude larger than MPGE or DV.

And of course you need HD footage to start with; or the comsumer HDDV version.

[AntnyMD]

From what Apple says, if you can make it, they'll burn it. HD DVD as authored by DVDSP can only be played in Apple DVD Player 4.6 (version 4.5 ships with Tiger so you'll have to download the update). Also you can only play HD DVD on a G5. The other thing is it takes a looooooooooong time to transcode that stuff at the moment.

Another thing that bugs me is H.264 causes MPEG Streamclip to crash, which means I'd have to first transcode the high definition transport stream to an HDV stream, then take that into QuickTime 7 Pro and wait a week.

[MACCA350]

You may find that a current dvd player may have trouble playing a 720/1080 signal since (I beleive dvd specs dictate(someone else can correct me)) all dvd's are mastered at 480ntsc/575pal.

Also there arn't many players that will output a 720 or 1080 signal (denon 5910 does) and even then they are upconverting the 480\575 signal to do so. I may be wrong but I doubt that current dvd players will play 720/1080 signals accurately as their proccessing configuration may not be setup to do so.

Try it and see how you go. Let us know the results.

cheers

[MACCA350]

howz that 3 replies within 10seconds

[MACCA350]

Or was that 10minutes

[pglock]

Wow, fast replies, or what...

Just to expand a little more, I was wondering if it was worth taking my DV (not HDV) tapes and encoding with H264 into a pseudo HDDVD so that I can keep the disk images as an archive and trash the .DV files to free up some disk space. I have a G5 to do the encoding work (overnight) and I've tried some test clips so I have no illusions about encoding times. The advantage about saving as DVD .img files is that they are easy to burn & send to my other friends with macs.

Or should I not bother at all?

[willrob]

I'm not sure. I've tried the new H264 on a small clip, and the results are impressive. But won't it geet recompressed (translated) into MPEG when you create the DVD image file?

The smaller H264 file size may no longer be so small. It should be easy to test the results with any short clip, convert to H264 and use iDVD to create a dish image which you can play with DVD Player. Open the disk to see how large the resulting MPEG files are compared to the original H264 file.

[pglock]

The workflow I was thinking of was to produce a 'normal' (mpg2) DVD and a 'HDDVD' from the same .dv file (it's not HD source) then delete the .dv to free up space. That way I'll have future-proofed my video (assuming H264 is the way to go for the next few years) and freed up significant disk space.

[willrob]

Once the two competing technologies for HDDVD merege (expected this summer), new devives and media will styart appearing. But the codec for these devices will new. Apple is putting the H246 out there mostly for web development, and as a temporary HD solution.

The "Blue Ray"(Pioneer) and Toshiba specs, when merged, will enable 40G DVDs. Which in HDV universe would still only be two to three hours.

[pglock]

So best not to start the engines on a monster H264 session then.

Thanks for the advice. I'll keep the .dv's for few more months and buy another firewire disk....

[pglock]

Back again with an observation...

Just been playing with compressor2 and dvdsp4. Using DV PAL source footage, I've sucessfully created a hybrid dvd which will play on a G5 in HD mode and on a normal player. However, I'm left with a 'so what' feeling as the 720x576 DV looks exactly the same to me as the high quality MPEG2 (for SD DVD) and H264 (For the 'HD' DVD).

Now it's time to start saving for a HDV camera...

[willrob]

Is the TV you compared them on a HDTV?

[pglock]

No, for the moment H264 HDDVD only plays on our 20" G5 iMac so I haven't seen this on a TV.

Also, there's not much available on HDTV for me in the UK until sky starts broadcasting so my TV is an old school 32" analogue 100Hz Sony.

[820am]

I was thinking of making an H264 encoded HD-DVD today, but after reading on the source requirements in the Compressor and DVDSP manuals, I decided against it.

The HD-DVD sounds great (though I don't have a g5) because you could make a 2hr+ HQ MPEG-2 movie...

Like backing up my Star Wars laserdiscs.