Why does my video recorded on HF100 at 1080 resolution come out as 480p?

[tom97531]

I bought a Canon HF100 camera last year. When I import the videos to my computer and view them through the Pixela software it came with, it shows the thumbnails as HD with 1920 x 1080 resolution. After burning the videos to a standard DVD through the same software and playing it on my PS3, it plays at 480p. After talking to Canon, they said I need to get a blu-ray burner. This of course is just the opposite of what they told me when I was originally looking to buy the video camera! My computer is about 4 years old and am considering getting a new one and the blu-ray burner. Before investing all that money I tried testing the idea of connecting the camera's SD card directly to my PS3's USB port via a card reader. It played the videos just fine, but it was still only 480p. Since this is the original file I was sure it would play at 1080 resolution. It plays store bought blu-ray movies at 1080 resolution with no problems. It made me wonder if I'd be wasting my time investing all that money in the computer, burner and more expensive discs only to have it play at the lower resolution. What am I doing wrong?

If I could get the above problem resolved, I would like to also know if instead of buying a blu-ray burner...

is it possible to just transfer the files to an external hard drive and play the videos on the PS3 off the hard drive at 1080 resolution?

does the Studio Plus software really allow me to burn 1080 resolution video onto a standard dvd?

[Ai Haibara]

DVD-Video discs have a maximum resolution of 720x480 (NTSC) or 720x576 (PAL). If you're creating a DVD-Video disc, you'll be limited to those maximum resolutions.

How is your PS3 connected to the TV?

[jagabo]

Make an AVCHD disc (DVD) and play on your PS3.

[tom97531]

My PS3 is connected with an HDMI cable. I don't think that's the problem though since I don't have this problem with store bought blu-ray movies.

[guns1inger]

Use media info to confirm that the file is in fact HD

[tom97531]

I ran it through Media Info and it says it's 1920 x 1080.

[poisondeathray]

In case it's not clear, all the information has been provided in the previous posts.

As mentioned, DVD-Video has a maximum resolution of 720x480.

AVCHD supports 1920x1080, and you can put it on a DVD (physical media) or blu-ray disc. The structure is different (there are no VOB's, instead it uses .m2ts), and it uses much more efficient h264 compression instead of MPEG2 that DVD-Video uses. Not all standalone units will be able to play AVCHD or blu-ray content on a DVD (it depends on firmware, among other things), but the PS3 definitely can.

I don't have studio plus, so I can't tell you if it can author your files in this fashion, but you can do the same thing with free software (there are dozens of posts on how to do this, just do a quick search)

[tom97531]

Sorry, I'm still confused. Are you saying that even though the original m2ts file only plays at 480p when I play it directly off the camera's SD card onto my PS3, that if I burn the video onto blu-ray it will play at 1080 resolution?

[poisondeathray]

Is your firmware upgraded? There was an early bug where PS3 downscaled everything on some TV's. Also is your TV 1080p capable? IIRC, this happens with the PS3 and older HDTV's that don't support true 1080p