The official AVS Guide to HD DVD Authoring. - Page 106

Actually, this thread is pretty much dead. Most folks have moved on to Blu-ray because of Toshiba's exit from the HD wars. As it turns out, Blu-ray on regular DVD is generally easier, although there are problems there, too. I think there are a few threads on Blu-ray creation here on AVS, but I haven't followed any of them regularly. For the most part, though, I don't do a lot of archiving onto Blu-ray DVDs, either. I use UnRAID and archive my HD captures from Dish and OTA (and my own HD video projects) to the server. Barring natural disaster or theft, it's probably a safer way to archive than DVD. The life span of DVD recordables is an issue long-term. And with a media server, everything is accessible immediately.

I was talking about creating Blu-ray like disc structures on regular DVDs (AVCHD), for playback on regular Blu-ray players, in a similar fashion as we did for HD DVD.

All my Dish captures are courtesy of Nextcom - as we've talked about from day 1 in this thread. I've been using a modified Dish 211 to capture streams. It captures both MPEG2 and Dish's version of MPEG4 (though I don't think Dish is doing MPEG2 anymore). It replaced my Dish 6000 HD receiver. I've had success creating AVDHD discs of both types of content (MPEG2 and Dish MPEG4) for playback on regular Blu-ray players. I've also had some failures. Not all set top players are compatible. I didn't pursue it once I decided not to archive to regular DVD discs anymore.

The "Blu-ray" iso's I create using tsMuxerGUI are all playable on the computer. I use PowerDVD Ultra and Virtual Clone Drive (to mount the iso's). Once tsMuxer massages the files, creates the chapters, and builds the Blu-ray folders, I use ImgBurn to create Blu-ray iso's. It's then a one-click process to mount and play them back, with full access to regular fast forward, rewind, chapter skip, pause, play, stop, etc., from a Media Center Remote. It's just like playing a regular Blu-ray disc from the computer.

Blu-ray iso's of regular OTA captures from all the usual sources are just as easy to create. I capture the MPEG2 files (in my case, usually with MyHD), use the same techniques as described in this guide to edit them (VideoRedo), then use tsMuxer and ImgBurn to create the Blu-ray iso's.

I like this process better than the HD DVD creation process. It eliminates the need to worry about particular discs or burners, or set top players being compatible. Although I still run into the occasional file that doesn't seem to play back 100% smoothly, for the most part it's a quicker and easier process than it was with HD DVD.

I've thought about doing a guide for this process, too, but I think there are other guides on AVS for doing similar things. If there's enough interest, though, and it doesn't step on others' toes, I might throw something together for Blu-ray, that would detail these steps more fully.

My advice? Put your indie films on Blu-ray. Pursuing HD DVD at this point is an exercise in futility. Long term, Blu-ray will die, too, but HD DVD is already dead. At least with Blu-ray there will be a few more years of relevance.

Sorry I can't be of any help. I never bought an HD DVD writer or media, so I have zero experience with such burns. I know that with AVCHD burns, iso's and discs play just fine on the computer, but having some parts of the file structure wrong make them incompatible with regular Blu-ray players. There may be a comparable issue with HD DVD at work with your burns.

What do you use to convert HD DVD to AVCHD? I use Clown BD and eac3to to convert my commercial HD DVDs to Blu-ray, and I can't recall running into sync issues - but HD DVD commercial discs typically have only a couple of .evo files.

Didn't I see you over in the RS40 thread, Hyrax? I'm really looking forward to getting that projector.