Trying to understand making HD DVD's
 

Ok I have the High Def. camera, now I want to make and play HD dvd's.
My local store has a blue/ray burner for around $700 and a player for around $900, The blank discs are around $20 each. Total investment around $2000 with tax.
Now what I dont understand is why I need all that.
The program I use for making my films is Pinnacle Studio 10.5 it cost around $80, now for a $45 add on it will burn 42 minutes of HD film onto a regular dual layer disk, using my regular $80 dvd burner. I would have to purchace the cheaper Toshiba HD player, around $400 to view them. Total investment $500 with tax.
Has anyone any experience in burning there own HD disks? Am I missing something here? Why does blue Ray need a special burner and HD-DVD does not?

add to that cost for Blu-Ray authoring software which is around $500.00 right now.

HD-DVD was smart enough to allow normal red laser DVD disks to be used to make HD-DVD disks. Yes they are smaller in size in terms of howmuch video you can fit on the disk but they work exactly the same. This in my opinion is a huge advantage for HD-DVD. Many consumers would be fine having 20-40 minutes record times on a disk if that would mean saving a lot of money in having to buy a new burner. When they want to move up to longer disks they can then at that point buy a HD-DVD burner. With Blu-Ray it is Blu-Ray or nothing so it is going to be very hard for consumers to get into recording disks of their kids events any time soon. I have nothing against Blu-Ray itself since it really is the exact same quality as HD-DVD but I do have a problem with it's price and the fact that no cheaper options were built in to work as stepping stones for consumers.

James,

I use the IODATA AVeL Linkplayer2 for exactly the purpose you stated. Eventually, the rest of the country will start to move to HD DVD players of either type, or both. When that happens, I will get the authoring package and start using HD DVDs instead of using WM9 on DVD-ROM.

Why do we need to upgrade eventually? Proper menus for our movies. People expect that. There are no fancy menus on my DVD-ROM.

I have the I-O Data AVeL LinkPlayer2 and the Toshiba A1 HD-DVD player.

Unless you need a distribution format or HDMI output, the Linkplayer is a less costly, more flexible device, but with quirks. The HD-DVD solution is not perfected either as some users of the newer A2 are reporting problems in handling HDV's native 25 mbps bitrate. If that situation is true or persists, having an early generation unit makes it useless for HDV except as a personal player. The state of affairs for HDV distribution is a mess.

I have been inexpensively creating HD-DVD disks on single and dual layer media but whether there is any future for them depends on whether new generation HD-DVD players will play them. Or HD-DVD needs a suite of inexpensive software for coding in VC1 which would allow for practical storage capacities and obviate the high bitrate problems of native HDV 25 mbps mpeg2t.

Either way, the suitability of HDV for BluRay is much worse at this time. It's wonderful for the Hollywood support it has lined up, but HD-DVD has otherwise proved thus far to be the qualitatively superior format on most counts.

I have personally also gone the HDDVD way, I use MAC/DVD Studio Pro/Toast 7 & 8. I burn onto single or dual Layer "-R"

On the PC, I belive this is what you need; Ulead Studio 10/Nero7 or 8.

I have tried it both ways and it works.

PS:

The ones made on a mac "MENUS DO NOT WORK"
The ones I made on PC "MENUS DO WORK"

Also, still can figure out how to get H264 to work on it (Toshiba's HDDVD, I have the A1).

I use Mpeg-2 compression for the HD DVD discs. 1280x720 at 19Mbps using Apple Compressor.

This works fine on the toshiba HD A1 player.

Note: If you are using a mac/DVD Studio Pro, don't compress the audio to Dolby Digital 2.0 You need to use uncompressed audio for the HD DVD's.

I export mpeg2 1920x1080 from premiere, import into Ulead DVD Movie Factory 5, export to HVDVD_TS folder on hard drive, then burn to a standard DVD using Nero. I then play it on my xbox360 HDDVD player.
You can get an hour plus on a dual layer disk. This is good for my projects, and the media is cheap!

Microsoft and the digital rights management bureacracy took the opportunity to get their foot in the door during the evolution of the HD-DVD specification. As a result, HD-DVD burning software will be topheavy with DRM oversight. I doubt, seriously, that HD(V) content will play in very many players besides those already mentioned here, if for no other reason than the hardware recording industry is pretty well controlled by the system.

There are special burners for HD-DVD too and they don't come cheap for now either, so using red-laser discs is just a temporary way of getting around the high cost of new technology. Once the cost of proper blue-laser burners and discs drops it will make sense to use the technology as it was intended, and at that point you probably won't see too many people trying to burn HD content onto red-laser discs.

Software-based players?
 

I'm not trying to hijack the thread, just attempting to gain more understanding.

To summarize what I understood so far: I can burn HD DVDs using Nero and watch them on either the AVeL LinkPlayer or the Toshiba A1 connected to an HD monitor.

1. How about software-based players? I have friends who use a PC to feed HD signals into their HD monitors, using an ATSC (off air) TV tuner PCI card. Now, if I burn a Windows Media HD content onto a DVD, that will also be played back on this system, right? But how about HD DVD content burned onto a regular DVD? Are there any (PC) software based players that will play that?

2. Also, what is the difference between the mpeg2 transport stream (.m2t) I can get off of my HDV camcorder and the mpeg2 encoded video content I can burn onto a regular DVD for viewing in an HD DVD player... if any? Can I simply take the m2t file, run it through say MPEG Streamclip to change the envelope into .mpg and burn that to the DVD to make an HD DVD?

Thanks,

DVD Studio Pro was updated last week (version 4.1.2) and I then used Compressor to encode the HD DVD assets with H.264. I authored the HD DVD using Dolby 2.0 and the disc played back fine on the DVD player which is on the Mac. I don't have access to a Toshiba HD DVD player though. But I'll assume (unless someone can post with a different experience) that the admonition about only using uncompressed audio was for the older DVD SP version and no longer applies.

I would assume that Apple's DVD player will playback more HD content especially when made on a mac comapred to a stand alone HD DVD player. I would assume the DVDSP update and the fact that it played on your mac really says nothing for playback on a toshiba player.

Thanks Patrick.

Yes, it was a rather lazy assumption. It was mostly based on my hazy recall of report(s) from the Mac forum after the latest DVD SP update and testing on a Toshiba player all being successful.

However, your upbraiding prompted me to take the time to search out and carefully re-study those earlier posts and I found something I'd not picked up on properly.

So it's no longer an assumption. DVD SP will make an HD DVD with Dolby that does play back on a Toshiba player.

So, thanks for that.

Pinnacle studio 10.7 will also make hybrid hd dvd's with DD5.1 sound

Exactly what I used to do. One query tho: did you find the beginning of the disc wouldn't be quite so fluid? I did a few test discs with 1 mpeg per chapter, and I found that the first chapter was a lil choppy then chapter 2 ran better. I'm guessing its because it couldn't spin the DVDR fast enough.

Worked great tho, but I'm going to wait until DVDLab HD comes out until I rebuy into the HD world again.