Affordable Blueray AUTHORING?

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You can really use anything you want. The latest version of Nero or whatever Roxio is calling their product today can burn to either Blu Ray or HD-DVD.

When I was at NAB back in April, I talked to reps at Apple and Sonic about their HD-DVD and Blu-ray authoring support. The Sonic products were weighted in their support for the new HD formats in their high end products (the industry standard Scenarist), but Apple's DVD Studio Pro (v3 affordable for pros @ about $400, v4 avail as part of the Final Cut Studio) was promising basic Blu-ray and HD-DVD support in near future updates (read, probably Jan, along w/ Blu-ray equipped Pro towers). The app allows for authoring of HD content DVDs now however.


The folks I spoke with all sounded like they were anxiously awaiting finalization of all the specs for the formats (this was, after all, April ) and that authoring tools would be quickly forthcoming. I'll bet you there will be a flood of software releases coming in early '07.

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The short-term cheap solution for the A/V compression is an MPEG-2 video and AC3 audio encoder or PCM audio capture that produce ES or unmuxed streams. For video, TMPEG 2.5 Plus will do this using [email protected] and it'll look a little better than the Sony encoder used for TFE and HoFD. I don't know if TMPEG 4 can, but 3 didn't do it. It's cheap, but looks good. Apple's Compressor does it, too, if you go for DVD Studio from Apple. The AC3 encode can be done by Besweet or a handful of packages. For PCM audio, just capture the audio uncompressed to WAV and the authoring app will do the LPCM conversion before muxing.


Cjplay.

I thought MS was providing VC-1 free

They will when the tools to actually mux vc1 streams are available widely. Right now you would need Scenarist BD to do this and that's about $50,000.


The problem with 'homebrew' Blu-ray authoring at the moment is that the only player out there - the Samsung - doesn't seem to play any disks properly and the only available 'budget' authoring tools are extremely basic.

WayneL,


What Grandmaster said... However, I still think there's royalties to be paid even though the encoders are free.


Cjplay.