Recently in HDDVD Category

If you bought into the HD-DVD technology as I did when it first launched, you may be stuck with a bunch of titles for hardware that's no longer supported. The movies and the hardware still work for now, but you won't see any new movies released on HD-DVD because the format is dead. In attempt to make good on all the purchases made during the early days of the Blu-ray and HD-DVD format war, Warner Brothers is offering the chance to swap 120 titles for their Blu-ray copies. How exactly does it work?

"When you copy HD video from a camcorder to a DVD, do you have to playback on a HD-DVD player or will it play back on a standard DVD player?"

It really depends on the format you choose for your DVD whether the DVD you burn will play in a standard DVD player, or whether you need an HD-DVD player in order to watch your DVD creation. If you have an HD-DVD player, the method I describe for burning HD-DVDs on standard DVD media will result in DVDs that only play in HD-DVD drives. Your other option is to output your HD content as a standard definition video during the authoring process. Here's how this works:

• Import your HD video into your favorite video authoring program.
• Make any edits to the video, adding effects, transitions, titles, and anything else you want to include in the movie.
• Save the movie as a standard definition 720x480 file, either in MPEG-2 format or in the case of something like Windows Vista's Movie Maker, you'd need to save the file as a WMV.
• You then use the file you just saved in your DVD project

Keep in mind this method does not result in high definition video on DVD. You are saving your HD video as standard definition video and authoring a DVD that will play on any set top DVD player.

In an article on InfoWorld today, Jeremy Kirk is reporting that we may finally get to make personal copies of our HD-DVD and Blu-ray movies without fear of going to jail. According to the article, the proposed licensing agreement is under negotiation by AACS Licensing Administrator members (including Sony, IBM, The Walt Disney Co., Warner Bros., and Microsoft) and the movie industry companies who use AACS copy protection to safeguard their content.

HD-DVD has a Managed Copy provision built into the specification, which allows for movie rights holders to enable consumers to make copies within a set of parameters. I'm less familiar with the inner workings of Blu-ray, but it seems to have a similar feature. Essentially the Managed Copy system is designed so that the copy remains in a rights managed state, but you have greater flexibility about what you can do with the copy. While this doesn't go far enough for some people, I certainly wouldn't care about making copies of my movies, if I knew that I could easily put a movie on my iPod or play it back from my home theater PC without having to buy the same movie three times.

While this doesn't solve the problem of making copies of titles currently available only on DVD, having a forward looking solution is certainly a step in the right direction. The next step toward placating those of us who like to have easy ways to consume our favorite entertainment when and where we want is to make it legal for cable and satellite companies to offer network DVR as a valid product offering. This would essentially mean that you could watch any show recently available in your cable lineup at any time, even if you forgot to set up your Tivo. BitTorrent and other P2P services currently fill this need, but at least in the United States we're considered criminals if we opt to locate shows out on the public Internet.

How to make an HD-DVD using standard 4.7GB DVD media or 8.5GB dual layer disks.

After shooting numerous hours of high definition video footage, I've been itching for a way to create some HD-DVDs. There are no HD-DVD burners on the market at the moment. And media seems to be in scarce supply. Sure, I could shell out $700 for a Blu-ray burner, but then I'd need to spend another $600 for a player that conveniently connects to my television (like a PS3, for instance). At least I can use the Xbox 360 HD-DVD player with Windows Vista or my 360, and there's now an HP HD-DVD player in the wild as well. When I found out Pinnacle added support for HD-DVD burning to Pinnacle Studio Plus, I was thrilled. Better yet, they do it by burning to standard 4.7GB DVDs or to 8.5GB dual layer disks.

The HD-DVD burning feature is a $50 upgrade to the existing Pinnacle Studio Plus package and works well for authoring in either Windows XP or Windows Vista. The first time you go to the Make Movie menu and choose HD DVD from the Disc Type menu, Pinnacle opens a window asking you if you want to activate the feature. You can also add it to an existing copy of Pinnacle Studio Plus directly from Pinnacle's site.

How to Make an HD-DVD with Pinnacle Studio

Once you have the HD-DVD portion of Pinnacle Studio Plus activated, it's relatively easy to make an HD-DVD. Click the Make Movie button and choose the Disc tab. Select HD DVD from the Disk Type drop down and choose a Video Quality. Based on my testing, you want to stick with Best Quality, which gives you 23 minutes of movie time on a 4.7GB disk and 42 minutes on a 8.5GB disk. There is an option to maximize movie on the disk and anther one that dynamically adjusts based on how much footage you have, but if you want your video to look great on disk, stick with Best Quality and edit accordingly.

The Settings page is where you might need to make a few changes. It's here you can set a custom bit rate for your video content, convert the video to progressive scan content as the disk is authored and choose whether to burn to disk directly or create a file on your hard drive and then burn.

The only time you want to use progressive encoding is if your content is already progressive (like if your camera shoots in 720p rather than 1080i).

Based on the test DVDs I burned, I highly recommend choosing the Safe mode for Burn Options. I made several coasters and had to go back and re-render my project, which made the whole process of burning disks take several times longer.

Menus and HD-DVD Authoring in Pinnacle

In my tests of adding menus to HD-DVD projects, the final DVD would not play. In each test, the video launched to the menu screen and selecting a chapter caused the video to error out. This leads me to believe that the menuing in Pinnacle Studio Plus is a standard def only feature. This isn't a show stopper for me, but at some point it would be nice to have a working menu structure for HD-DVDs.

Some tips on HD-DVD Authoring with Pinnacle Studio:

• Pinnacle labels the disk the same name as your video project, so if you want a meaningful disk name, choose your project name accordingly.
• The software does not automatically adjust based on the type of disk you put in the drive. If you're using a dual layer disk, make sure you set the software to dual layer or you'll still only get 23 minutes of recording time when burning the project.
• Don't check the box to re-encode your content. The software will re-encode as necessary and it's almost never better to re-encode your files without reason.
• Know your format and playback options before authoring - in general, HDV cameras record interlaced content. You should master your disk with the interlacing intact under most circumstances.
• If you recorded your video at 59.94, you need to decimate the video to 29.97 with something like VirtualDub or Pinnacle won't recognize the video footage

While this isn't the perfect solution of having an HD-DVD burner and actual HD-DVD blank media, Pinnacle's $50 add-on for HD-DVD authoring is worth the investment. The disks play in the Xbox 360 HD-DVD player both connected to a PC and to an Xbox 360 console. They are also compatible with the Toshiba HD-DVD players. One especially nice feature is support for playback in Vista even without connecting to an HDCP compliant display, which makes for a more compelling story for those of us who don't have HDCP compliant monitors yet. You can acquire both Pinnacle Studio Plus and the HD-DVD add-on direct from Pinnacle.

One of the things I like most about the Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive is portability. I can connect it to my Xbox 360 or I can plug it in to a PC elsewhere in the house. The only tricky part is figuring out all the right pieces to making HD-DVD playback work on your PC. Windows XP doesn't currently support HD-DVD playback without finding a hacked driver for the Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive, so if you want HD-DVD playback, moving to Windows Vista is your best option.

The software part of the equation is easy. Cyberlink PowerDVD Ultra supports both HD-DVD and Blu-ray playback in the same download. It has the bonus of solving a number of problems related to using the new AVCHD camcorder format.

It was almost a year ago when I did my Xbox 360 giveaway. Since that time, Xbox 360 consoles became less scarce and might be the best consumer buy this holiday season - but not because of the games. There's a whole lot of effort in the entertainment industry and in the consumer electronics marketplace to make it harder for people to use their digital media however they see fit. The Xbox 360 consoles of the current generation might be the last consumer set top devices we see that don't encumber our media consumption from a million different angles.

The Toshiba set top HD-DVD player offers HDMI output with HDCP content protection on the signal for delivering digital video to your screen. Using the HDMI output, you get full resolution video of either 1920x1080 or 1280x720, depending on what your television screen supports. It also has component outputs, but those won't display full HD resolution, instead forcing the picture to 480p. If you happen to have an HDTV with no HDMI in, you're stuck with a lower resolution picture. In general, this will become the norm as hardware ships with support for an Image Constraint Token which forces content to a maximum resolution of 960x540. The Xbox 360 currently either lacks this restriction or doesn't have any content with Image Constraint Token support turned on, as demonstrated by my recent tutorial on copying HD-DVD with an Xbox as the source.

The Xbox 360 is the exception in this case. Hampered devices are about to become the norm. Blu-ray players and the new Sony PlayStation 3 also have HDMI with HDCP content protection. Using component connections with either also hampers your experience. The Xbox continues to output the maximum resolution available without hampering the signal.

In general, this is good news if you want to maintain some level of access to your media. Granted, my method for capturing HD from the Xbox is neither affordable nor practical from a time standpoint, but I like knowing I can do it. I specifically wanted to compare some video from the Xbox and would not have been able to do so without this option. Xbox also makes streaming audio and video to your home theater easier with the new software Zune Player (no Zune hardware required) and while the experience isn't perfect, the two combined make it largely unnecessary to have a Media Center PC to enjoy watching movies from your computer in your home theater.

Before you write off the Xbox as just for kids or only for gamers, take a look at what may be the last device in the HD space with what we consider the analog hole in its unhampered format. There's no guarantee that future versions of Xbox 360 consoles will continue to allow this freedom, but in the meantime this seems to be the norm.

I started out with a plan to write an article about how HD-DVD is visually superior to downloads available in Xbox Video Marketplace. After all, how could a 6.1GB HD 720p download possible look as rich as the 1080p content on an HD-DVD? As it turns out, Xbox Video Marketplace does an outstanding job of delivering great looking video that is almost indistinguishable from HD-DVD. Here's how I came to this conclusion.

With the current limited selection of movies available in both HD-DVD and the WMV HD format used by Xbox Video Marketplace, I used V for Vendetta as my movie of comparison. Watching each movie independently, I could find no artifacts in either video file, no macro blocks during motion sequences, and a great range of colors in both cases. The Xbox Video Marketplace file looked just slightly brighter than the HD-DVD, but overall I couldn't tell any real difference.

Since my reasonably well-trained eye couldn't see a difference, I decided to go a step further and compare the videos using software tools. At the moment the HD options on Xbox Video Marketplace are limited, so I choose V for Vendetta as the title available in both HD-DVD and the Video Marketplace for a test. I captured the 20 second segment of V for Vendetta on the rooftop where the explosions happen during the 1812 Overture. You can read more about how to capture HD video from an Xbox here. I captured both versions of the movie at 1280x720 and left the VBI data, which represents 20 pixels at the top of a movie file, as a reference color for true black.

After capturing the videos, I created an AVISynth script to play the two clips side-by-side to look for obvious differences in each frame. To my eye, the only difference is a very slight color variation.

Full-size comparison

For deeper analysis, I enlisted my friend and colleague, Brandon Wirtz, who is among the smartest minds in video compression. Brandon does a very detailed analysis of each video, with the net result that both look great. You can read his video analysis methodology for more details.

The one thing I'll point out about the slight difference in color variation is the HD-DVD authoring tools must use a different encoding solution to get their output than the Windows Media Encoder used to create the Xbox Video Marketplace files. By pulling the two files in side-by-side in VirtualDub, applying a level filter that drops the Gamma of the video to 10, and looking at the result you can see that the color in the two files does not match. Setting the Gamma of the video to 10 has the net effect of moving colors darker than the exact middle of the spectrum closer to black and colors lighter than the exact middle of the spectrum closer to white.

You can see that the HD-DVD file on the left has blacks that match the VBI data in the top 20 pixels of the file, while the black levels in the Xbox Video Marketplace file are effectively shades of grey. This exposes an existing limitation of Windows Media Encoder and the newer Studio Encoder from Microsoft, which both apply the NTSC color space to all video encoded rather than the ATSC standard HD color space when encoding video that's meant for HD.

For the end viewer, this comes across as looking similar to running the contrast and brightness up a little on your screen and gives the image a marginally flatter feel. Considering most people don't calibrate their television correctly in the first place, this is likely a non-issue, although it might throw off one of those dynamic filtering options found on many HD screens. There's no artifacting in either the Video Marketplace file or the HD-DVD. Both have smooth motion. Both give you a great looking movie.

If you own a 1080p screen, HD-DVD is definitely the way to go, since the disks provide the full 1920x1080 video. If your screen is either 720p or 1080i, Xbox Video Marketplace movies give you a great way to sample HD movies and ultimately look better than anything I've ever rented from Comcast's HD On Demand.

It's still too early to call the horse race on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. One format may win or we may end up with two competing formats for the foreseeable future. I'm going with HD-DVD because I can connect an HD-DVD drive to my Xbox 360 and get great looking movies.

One of the key disadvantages of HD-DVD is no convenient way to make back-up copies of the discs. The HD-DVD spec supports what's known as a managed copy, but so far none of the HD-DVD disks I own have this feature. If I want to watch my HD content somewhere other than my Xbox, or if I want to backup my $30 investment, at this point, I have to create my own solution. Until someone starts giving me managed copies, I'm making copies of my HD-DVDs to watch them where I want to using an analog solution. Following the guidelines presented here, you can use an Xbox 360 with the HD-DVD drive and a PC to make copies of HD-DVD movies.

As the image outlines above, you need an HD capture card with analog component inputs. This card captures both the audio and video from the Xbox 360 via the component output cable. Audio will be passed either via the stereo outs on the component cable or via Toslink to your soundcard (the 5.1 Surround option). A four drive array of SATA disks provides enough disk write speed for real time capture of the HD video.

Breaking this down, the requirements for copying HD-DVDs using this method are:

• An Xbox 360 and Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive.
• Tons of fast-write drive space
• HD capture card with component inputs
• Video Capture Software
• Proper cabling
• Video conversion software to output a compressed HD video file

Xbox 360 and HD-DVD Drive

The Xbox 360 and HD-DVD drive are self explanatory. If you don't have these, you likely don't have any reason to copy HD-DVDs. In theory, you could also create a similar workflow with the Toshiba HD-DVD player. I find the Xbox 360 to be more compelling because it allows you to extend your media from your PC, play HD-DVD movies and play games. After further investigation, the component output of the Toshiba HD-DVD player only supports resolutions up to 480p, so an Xbox is required to make this work.

Allocating enough Hard Disk Space

Capturing HD video requires massive amounts of drive space. More importantly you need drive space with fast write times. The easiest way to do this is to create a cheap RAID 0 array using either an onboard SATA controller or an external SATA card. For the HD-DVD capture scenario, you want a minimum of 4 eSATA drives connected to a controller, which provide throughput to easily caputre 720p or 1080i video. Capturing HD-DVD consumes approximately 6GB per minute of video. For a combination of speed and space, a four-drive configuration of 320GB SATA drives provides a little over a Terabyte of storage at a reasonable price.

Promise SATA 4-Drive Enclosure
Promise SATA Card
Seagate 320GB SATA Drives

HD Capture with AJA XENA LH

The best solution I've found for analog HD capture is the AJA XENA LH. It includes both HD-SDI support as well as the analog connections required for this component out capture process. I connect the onboard component input connections from the Xbox to the XENA LH. For my purposes, I'm capturing the audio as stereo, but you could also capture to a Toslink-capable audio card as well. The XENA LH ships a video capture application called Machina, which also has plug-ins for most major video editing apps.

PC Optimized for Video Editing

Most PCs can handle standard definition DV from a digital video camera with no problem. HD capture is more complicated because you need to write the data as fast as it's coming off the capture card. Disk drive write speeds will be a major limiting factor, but you also need plenty of horse power from your CPU and more memory will come in handy when it's time to process the final video output.

It's worth noting this scenario currently will not work with Windows Vista as there are no HD capture solutions with Windows Vista drivers.