Blu-ray?

[Walt VanRheen]

One thing to consider is the the ability of your BD player to play BD-R (BluRay Recordable). When I purchased my BD player last year, not many units where capable of playing BD-R. I am wondering if that might be contributing to the "coaster" issues. For me, BD-R was the only way to go as I dont have a huge demand for copies (yet) but I needed to uphold my 1080 HD camera. You also need to make sure your editing software can handle everything. I am using Sony Vegas Pro 9 and it can handle everything I throw at it.

 

[Mike Hollingshead]

Pasting this in here for later reference as I'll surely forget it, not that I full get it all now. For one it seems the earliest players and some $150 options right now, only play bd-rom. So that is one potential compatability issue if you burn to bd-r or bd-re. Here is a best buy blu-ray player list showing the formats they play.

So one would have to make sure any buyers knew their player could play more than just bd-rom(note the two $149 options on there only do those and not bd-r/re).

From this site: http://www.afterdawn.com/glossary/terms/bdav.cfm

The BDAV disc format is the consumer oriented alternative to the BDMV discs made by professional Authoring houses for movie releases. Although early Blu-ray players were released with Firmware allowing playback of non-AACS encrypted content on BDMV discs, current Blu-ray specifications will result in that feature being removed, and BDAV discs being the only unencrypted Blu-ray format supported on players.

This gets all confusing, but it seems only very high priced authoring programs will add in that AACS deal. But maybe it's just a combination of reading old threads is all so far. It seems if your authoring software doesn't deal with that and include it, then the only thing that will play your blu-ray disc made from home is your computer. So when authoring it's a matter of getting that all sorted out.

And for what it is worth, TMPGENC products have always ruled for me. Get some of those store bought cheap aps and their encoding was horrible. Do 5000 for bitrate on one of those and the same with TMPGENC and it was like night and day difference. Hell I still much prefer using it to encode over premiere pro 1.5. Pondering their authoring ap again if I did go and do the whole blu-ray thing. It is here.

Just a matter of reading around and better understanding that whole AACS protection thing that has to be in there or newer standalone home blu-ray players won't play the disc. Surely the new aps like this TMPGENC one will have that included.

And from that TMPGENC author ap. http://tmpgenc.pegasys-inc.com/en/product/taw4_feature_smart.html I wonder if straight mpeg2 from the HDV tape is considered blu-ray compliant already and if it would leave it alone completely. Probably not if it sees it as 1440x1080 instead of 1920x1080. Hmm.

What kind of files does the Smart Rendering Engine support? Smart Rendering is possible with MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and DivX sources. Editing HDV camcorder sources with Smart Rendering considerably reduces picture quality loss.

Hmmm, 60 minutes of HDV I think is 13 gigs. Seems you would almost be able to put the files on there as is and get nearly 2hrs on 25 gigs.

Edit: I guess the last thing I might be wondering about in all this is how or if one can make a bd-rom. If that will be the most playable disk type, and some players can only play those, it'd be nice to be able to make one....but guessing that is not possible for the home author/burner. I'd probably be willing to tell those that have players that don't play bd-r, bd-re that they are sol. The problem will be those that just order and don't have a clue what their player can or can't play. Nothing is ever easy when it comes to video and dvd or now blu-ray.

Edit 2: As figured...

http://forum.slysoft.com/showthread.php?p=110352

Originally Posted by Adbear
No I wasn't wrong. You are still not making a BD-ROM disc, just a BD-R or BD-RE disc with BDMV folders. The only way you can make a BD-ROM disc is to have it professionally authored and pressed.
The BD-ROM flag is pressed into the disc in a non copyable section of the disc so that players can tell if it's a BD-ROM or a BD-R/RE and therefore know if it's allowed to play it if the disc has AACS encryption on it

But what the poster that said he was wrong said sounds interesting and worth pasting too for later.

This Is one way!
rip the BD to your hdd with anydvd, burn the out put folders to disc as data UDF 2.50 meaning BDMV Folder and certificate and whatever it ripped to your hdd varies by tittle a little, make sure your creating a closed disc meaning finalized, this may not result in (booktype BD-ROM) but your BD player with Updated Firmware Will see this as a BD-ROM BDMV disc, and it will play properly menu's and all that

there are ways to create BD-ROM book-type Disc's at home too Nero had up a few versions back In 8 that Sony released the BDMV spec to them and that it now supports BDMV disc authoring, this was after my time playing with these things and I don't care to burn disc's anymore do to cost, so I never bothered with this to try, how ever my trial disc's all work fine with what I wrote above,

 

[sebenste]

One thing that you need to remember is the quality of the source material. Let me be blunt: An HD video source with an extremely high bitrate downconverted to 480i widescreen and played back on a DVD player hooked up to a Samsung 1080p HDTV via HDMI will look excellent...and *most* people will be fooled into thinking that it's HD. If you shoot in poor light, in rain, in cloudy skies...HD is more adversely affected than SD. I've seen SEC football games on CBS, the broadcast HD gold standard, transmitted at 1 gigabit/sec to CBS before being downcoverted to 19.4 mb/sec 1080i on my local affiliate look fantastic...until you get a dull, grey sky. Then it gets close to looking like SD. I'm an HD guy, and I've installed and/or recommended numerous HDTV's to many people. Blu-Ray looks amazing on pro quality 1080p and even upconverted 720p/1080i...much, much less so on "prosumer" 1080i/720p camcorders. I'd say wait until the good cameras and prices come down before producing in HD, or be prepared to look at a lot of scenes that don't look significantly better than good ol' SD.

Quoting Blu-ray.com:

Blu-ray Disc player household penetration is up to 12.3 million for the first quarter of 2009, a 71% gain year over year, according to new data from research firm Centris, just published in its report “U.S. Communications and Entertainment”. This includes 7 million households with a PlayStation 3 (up 52%).

Again according to Centris, the number of American households with an HDTV is up to 50.5 million, up 33% from the first quarter of 2008. On the other hand, both satellite and cable industries appear to have stagnated somewhat, with only slight growth or none at all.

So there you have it. I'm not discouraging you to do this, but I'm just letting you know what I've experienced in the field and working with HDTV's and HD consumer cameras.

 

[Mike Hollingshead]

I already have things in HDV so can see and get the differences between it and SD.

My cheap HDV looks a lot better than my previously in use cheap SD. There's a clear difference there and it would just be nice to output to a HD tv at the same quality as what is on the tape, rather than down convert the HDV to SD which is also then needed compressed further to fit on a dvd. Sounds like you can just about take the exact stream off the tape and get that into blu-ray with little encoding to it.

I think the uber nice quality HD camera options will be out there for a while. Hell I can't even afford the nice prosumer versions like the FX1000 or whatever it is.

But yeah, cheap HDV sucks big time in lower light. Rapidly looks far far worse than my cheap SD cams. I just have plenty of stuff that flips that and looks far better than SD.

 

[Mark Blue]

I probably sound like a broken record with my suggestions from what I read in Maximum PC (a magazine I subscribe to), but in the September 2009 issue they have a new "Best of the Best" Blu-ray burner. The previous model they liked was the LG GBW-H20L. You can bone up on the LG specs and read their review here: http://www.maximumpc.com/article/reviews/lg_gbwh20l

In this month's issue they have crowned the new Pioneer BDR-2203 as the best Blu-ray burner going. It isn't up on their website yet, so I'll quote what they wrote in the magazine for you.

"For more than a year, LG's 6x GBW-H20L set the standard for Blu-ray burners, even amid newer 8x rated competition. Finally, our old favorite has been unseated. Pioneer's BDR-2203 actually lives up to it's 8x rating, breaking our BD-R write record by filling a 25GB disc in less than 15 minutes. But besides that, the BDR-2203 is also a solid peformer with standard DVD writes. And when it comes to DVD ripping, it rocks. While many Blu-ray drives lag behind their standard DVD brethern at the task of copying movie DVDs to a hard disk, the BDR-2203 is right up there with the best of them. What's more, at $250, the BDR-2203 undercuts many of it's peers. 'Nuff said."

I myself have always been a firm believer in Plextor as the premier burner company whether you're dealing with CDs, DVDs or anything else optical. They frequently update firmware (very important) and offer SATA models in almost any model line they introduce. The build quality of a Plextor is second to none and I kid you not, compared to other burners it's like comparing a Yugo to a Bugatti when they're side by side. In other words, there is no comparison, but then that's just my opinion. I see they have a couple of Blu-ray models on their website. If you're interested they can be found here: http://www.plextoramericas.com/index.php/blu-ray

I've actually been pondering the idea of getting one myself when I build my next PC (next few months), which should compliment another purchase I'm considering for next year (Canon HV-40). I also see home Blu-ray players are in the affordable range now with several models and brands available at Crutchfield starting around $249. BTW, did you ever buy that uber expensive computer monitor you were looking at a couple of months ago?

 

[Mike Hollingshead]

Thanks for the thoughts Mark. I can't remember which ones I even talked about then, but wound up getting this one: http://www.prad.de/en/monitore/review/2008/review-hp-lp2475w.html About the best bang for the buck it appears while getting a wide gamut lcd.

 

[Mark Blue]

Looks like you made a good choice. I've often thought that the 24" is the perfect size as anything bigger (30" for example) is like having a friggin' TV screen on your desktop. I certainly like the port selection your model comes with, especially DisplayPort as that future proofs your purchase. It even has all of the older ports for backward compatibility. Having HDMI is another plus as you can use it with your HD camcorder as well for direct viewing. Didn't mean to change the subject, but looks like you did well for yourself!