OT: Toshiba selling HD-DVD consumer Player in Chicago
 

They're finally selling the HD-DVD player now in Chicago. Toshiba manufactured it and it's connected to a slew of HDTV's at Tweeter here in Chicago. It's the first one I've seen on sale and actually working.

Now comes the task of figuring out how to author an HD-DVD using content from our choice of camera...

I've heard its as simple as capturing your HDV content, demuxing the video and audio stream, then authoring (no menus, just a timeline) an HD-DVD disc in DVD Studio Pro. A DVD-R can only hold about 20-40 minutes of footage.

But someone that owns a toshiba player actually did this and it worked well.

No 1080p... yet
 

I looked at the Toshiba HD-DVD player yesterday. The picture it outputs as seen on the Westinghouse 42" 1920x1080 LCD (1080p capable) is quite amazing.

But I did note that the Toshiba player does not yet output 1080p, just 720p and 1080i. I was told that it would support 1080p in the future after a firmware upgrade. Or is that a vaporware upgrade?!

Although very tempted, I didn't buy it, but I did pop for the Westinghouse LCD. Hopefully I won't experience the on/off issues that have been reported with it. You know what they say about early adopters and arrows in the back... in three months I'll be kicking myself for not waiting for LED/LCD.

By the way, the Westinghouse apparently upconverts 1080i to 1080p for display with a Faroudja chip. Hard to say, but the combination of the Toshiba HD-DVD player and the Westinghouse does look good and hopefully will be even better with true 1080p.

Tip

I'm looking into authoring from the HD-100 sourced material to the format. Seems straight forward as m2v & wav (multichannel) are supported without issue. The question is about the menu system and file structure on the disk. Somebody out there must know. Maybe the venerable videohelp.com?

From what I've heard its a straight play timeline for now.

Don't know what PC DVD authoring apps support HD DVD protocol, but I've made a few HD DVD's from DVDSP4 and played them back at 1080i on the Toshiba player.

The material was Canon HDV 24F (effectively 1080 24p) and looked amazingly good on the Westinghouse at the local Best Buy. I believe the LCD had some kind of deinterlacing method that made proper 1080p from the 1080i playback. Faroudja would be my guess.

Looked amazing.

Barlow,

How did you burn the material to disc? I take it for granted that your were using DVD-R material.

How much footage can you fit on a DVD-R? I know that it is about 4.2 gigs, but how much time?

Thanks,

Dan Weber

Stephen, you need to read my posts more often ;)

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/win...d/default.aspx

MS tools for HD-DVD content creation with a HD-DVD simulator. Not yet elegant, but workable with some effort.