Authoring for HD DVD player

[shakste]

Hi

I have a Marantz dvd player which supports HD DVD's. I have a few 720p .avi and .mp4 videos on my pc which i would like to write to disks to play in the dvd player. Just wondering how to do this without compromising the video quality. Normal DVD authoring programs downscale the picture etc. Writing the files directly as data files causes an error along the lines of "resolution not supported". The files are small enough to fit on single/ dual layer disks. Finally i have my dvd player connected to my tv using component outputs. Will this transfer a 720p or do i need to change to hdmi cables?

Thanks

[guns1inger]

Depending on the player, component should be able to handle up to 1080i, so 720p should not be an issue. Your manual will confirm this.

What model player is this ? Are you sure it is a HD DVD player, and not a DVD player that does HD upscaling ? Not the same thing.

[jman98]

Are you sure that it REALLY supports HD DVD and you are not mistaking HD DVD for some other format? I saw something that indicated that Marantz has a player that supports HD Divx, which is NOT the same thing as HD DVD. Before we spend a lot of time trying to answer this question, you need to be absolutely sure that it really supports HD DVD because if you are wrong, you are just going to waste your time burning discs that it can't play. At this time I cannot confirm that Marantz ever made a true HD DVD player. You MUST get your terms right here. If you are unsure of what it supports, then post a photo of the manual where it shows what formats it supports and we can look at it and tell you.

I have a Toshiba HD DVD player and it was a real bitch to get discs authored that the player would play. I only found 2 programs that worked and neither was free. Ulead had a version of Movie Factory that could do it. I think it was version 6. But I quickly became very unhappy with the Ulead program. It was incredibly fussy about everything it got as input and the least little thing would cause it to re-encode the video. You do NOT want Ulead encoding your video - ever. It not only takes a long time, the output video is very poor quality. In the end I was able to get a version (no longer made or supported) of Scenarist that could author HD DVD discs. I found Scenarist to be a lot easier to use, but I am used to using Scenarist for DVD authoring. Scenarist is not user friendly at all and you probably won't be able to use it, if you can even find a copy of that old version, without a guide of some kind.

I think MultiAVCHD has a mode that can theoretically produce HD DVD output. MultiAVCHD is free, but I have never tested its output. It might work, but I wouldn't bet the house on it.

Component output to your TV is fine. There is no need to get HDMI cables that I can think of.

[shakste]

Hey thanks so much for the replies. Damn... Just read through the literature and ur quite right that it only plays regular dvds with upscaling. Really sorry bout that . Well in any case what would be the best option for burning now? Will it only be able to play read regular sd video and then simply upscale it or is there still a way to burn the files better? The only reason i really want to be able to do this is because i usually play it through my laptop in which case picture is perfect but i only have a 2 channel audio card and don't really wanna buy one so that i can play 5.1 audio if the dvd player can do it for me.

The dvd player is a a dv 3002 if that helps. Link for specs http://us.marantz.com/Products/2136.asp

Thanks again

[jman98]

Thank you for that link. Your player only supports standard definition video in any of the formats it supports. Yes, it can only play sd video and upscale it.

ConvertXtoDVD is not free, but many like it and it's a pretty easy to use program to convert various formats to DVDs. It can create menus too if that matters to you. You can search our guides and our Tools section for other options. Some are free. But the free ones all involve a good deal of learning prior to use and many people just want a simple to use program that they can use on the first attempt like ConvertXtoDVD.

[wulf109]

multiAVCHD will author in HD-DVD but it's a non-standard format,i think it's called 3x DVD. Playback is a problem on my Toshiba A20 and A3 they would play but if you interrupt linear play for any reason the player locks up and you have to unplug it from power to restore operation.
Ulead 6+ has an HD-DVD add-on. The minimum bitrate it supports is 11-12MBs,so no movie will fit on a DVD9. I never got it to finish a re-code,I would always get an error and it would abort.

[shakste]

Thanks so much for all the replies. Think i may just have to think about upgrading my player or buying a ps3 to that i can watch some hd content.

[jman98]

Ulead 6+ has an HD-DVD add-on. The minimum bitrate it supports is 11-12MBs,so no movie will fit on a DVD9. I never got it to finish a re-code,I would always get an error and it would abort.

Just wanted to briefly point out that we have already determined that the original poster does NOT have an HD DVD player after all.

I never heard of the bit rate requirement you mentioned, but you may well be right. I didn't make very many HD DVDs with Ulead, but all of them were under 80 minutes in length and you can get 11+ MB of bitrate on such a film to fit on a DVD9 disc. All of the HD DVDs I made that were longer were made with Scenarist, which didn't care at all what the bit rate was. It was pretty fussy about what it would accept for video and audio input, but if you used AC3 audio at something like 440 KHz or lower and MPEG-2 video, it would happily create an HD DVD that my Toshiba player would play.