Should I offer a Blu-ray DVD?

[Robert Lane]

Offering a BR disc in the current market is a dicey proposition at best for one reason: Direct-play HD files.

Take a look at this device:

Western Digital | WD TV HD Media Player | WDAVN00BN | B&H Photo

For less than the cost of any BR player you get this HD movie playback device that can be connected to *anything*, an HDTV, a computer or even an SD-TV via composite connector. You can't beat that level of output choices compared to BR because not all computers have BR players and not everyone has a stand-alone set-top BR player. But *everyone* has a computer and either an HD or SD-TV.

And the cost of this device is so little you can easily build this into your current price schedule and still make a very nice profit.

The best part is, you don't have to worry about authoring a disc or worry about encoding types, bitrates etc. Finalize your movie, export it to this device (in supported formats) and you're done.

Now for the downside: It's not a menu-driven experience like a DVD or BR disc, it just plays movie files. I'm sure that if it doesn't exist already someone will create a menu-driven interface to use with devices such as this to replace the DVD-style motion menus we're used to - something like what Macromedia Director used to be. There may already be software that does this and I just don't know about it, but surely someone with programming knowledge will make this an eventuality.

Until (or if) BR authoring capabilities like Scenarist or Blu-Print make it down to the level of DVD Studio Pro or Encore offering BR may or may not make sense from a cost-of-workflow output perspective. These HD-movie devices offer a very tasty and extremely simple and cost-effective alternative.

[Taky Cheung]

The lack of menu is really not impressive to clients. All my wedding couples want their wedding DVD movie like. My DVD menu structure provides extra features such as multiple audio track and language settings.

Then I also don't want to just copy them a file. I would like them to order more copies of DVD and BluRay.

[Robert M Wright]

Originally Posted by Martyn Hull

Robert are you saying hd mpeg2 BLU RAY is only close to the quality of sd mpeg 2 DVD,i am a bit confused and probobly missing your point, certainly MPEG2 BDs i make are vastly superior to DVD.

I'm saying the compression quality (bitrate per pixel) can be reasonably similar between SD MPEG-2 on a DVD and HD MPEG-2 on a BluRay disk.

[Ron Evans]

Originally Posted by Robert M Wright

I'm saying the compression quality (bitrate per pixel) can be reasonably similar between SD MPEG-2 on a DVD and HD MPEG-2 on a BluRay disk.

I don't think that is quite correct. Assuming SD at 8Mbps and Bluray at 25Mbps the bits per pixel will be 23.15 for SD and 12.06 for HD. However for the same screen area HD will have 6 times the number of pixels. So that will be 3 times the data per screen area which is what really matters. When one considers that a BLuray disc holds 2 hours at this 25Mbps rate but one would have to drop the SD data rate to closer to 4 Mbps to get 2 hours on ( or of course use a dual layer at the 8Mbps) the difference could be more than a 3 times improvement for HD.

Ron Evans

[Robert M Wright]

Originally Posted by Ron Evans

I don't think that is quite correct. Assuming SD at 8Mbps and Bluray at 25Mbps the bits per pixel will be 23.15 for SD and 12.06 for HD. However for the same screen area HD will have 6 times the number of pixels. So that will be 3 times the data per screen area which is what really matters. When one considers that a BLuray disc holds 2 hours at this 25Mbps rate but one would have to drop the SD data rate to closer to 4 Mbps to get 2 hours on ( or of course use a dual layer at the 8Mbps) the difference could be more than a 3 times improvement for HD.

Ron Evans

A single layer BluRay disk holds between 5-6 times as much data as a single layer DVD disk. The ratio is about the same comparing a dual layer BluRay disk to a dual layer DVD disk. As you mentioned, HD material has about 6 times as many pixels as SD material. Comparing (same number of layer) BluRay HD to DVD SD, for the same time length of video, the number of bits per pixel is roughly in the same neighborhood.

[Ron Evans]

Originally Posted by Robert M Wright

A single layer BluRay disk holds between 5-6 times as much data as a single layer DVD disk. The ratio is about the same comparing a dual layer BluRay disk to a dual layer DVD disk. As you mentioned, HD material has about 6 times as many pixels as SD material. Comparing (same number of layer) BluRay HD to DVD SD, for the same time length of video, the number of bits per pixel is roughly in the same neighborhood.

Now I understand what your saying. Of course this is why one needs a Bluray disc to hold all the extra data for the 6 times as many pixels. That extra data is used to improve the picture quality by at least a factor of 3.

Ron Evans