HD DVD burned onto red laser disc
 

There's an active discussion on avsforum.com about making HD DVDs. Look under HD DVD software. It works great for HDV, as well as broadcast captured to PC.

That feature got added to DVD Studio Pro last year (June 2005). The only problem was at that time there were no set top boxes that would play it back. But you could play it back on your Mac computer.

Alsoj, it's my understanding that if you do make an HD-DVD, it has to be MPEG-2 for the current set top boxes. They don't understand H.264 or MPEG4 as of yet.

-gb-

Greg,

The MPEG2 is a limitation of the Ulead authoring software. You can get 40 minutes or so on a single layer disc with pretty good quality. If you look for the ABSOLUTE best encoder you could do better.

Reading HD DVD on red laser disc is standard, so any present or future HD DVD player should work. It can be MPEG 2, AVC, or VC-1. I am looking for an alternative authoring program for the advanced codecs. BlueRay does NOT have this feature.

There is a LOT of discussion about this on avsforum!

the one codec that is NOT on the HD DVD players is AVCHD, which I can understand but is a shame, On the BD side the ONLY RED laser HD content codec IS AVCHD, as Sony attempts to control how their players are used

SO it would seem that is you want to use red laser dvd's with your own created content, your playback option is either a PC or a HD DVD player (including X box 360 with the HD DVD add on)

Sharyn

All Hollywood HD-DVD movies in fact only use VC1 for the video and not mpeg-2 at all. It is Blu-ray that is only using mpeg-2 right now.

Currently Microsoft has not released a version of VC1 in HD for the general market, until that time, "home brew" HD on Red DVD's pretty much need to use MPEG2

Sharyn

Maybe I'm confused here, but I thought WM9 IS VC-1. The WM9 encoder has been available for free at Microsoft's web site for some time.

I believe WMV9 is the technology underlying VC-1, but the file formats may be different (like how you can use any codec in an AVI or MOV file).

I think you will find that the ability to take HD material and encode it to VC1 in HD is not available in the consumer yet

Sharyn

What I was alluding to in my original posting was that someone used Apple's DVD Studio Pro to burn an HD-DVD but using H.264 as a compression scheme. This HD DVD played back on the Apple, but the set top box refused to read it. It's my understanding that if you do the same thing using MPEG2 in place of H.264, the HD-DVD players will recognize and play the disc.

This happened earlier this year and the players may have become more 'accepting' of other codecs. I don't own one yet so I can't be certain.

-gb-