Making DVDs From HD movies

"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:

Making HD-DVD and Blu-ray Copies Legal

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.

HD-DVD Authoring for Home Movies

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.

How to Play HD-DVDs with Windows Vista

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.

Xbox 360 Offers The Last True Analog Hole?

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.

Xbox Video Marketplace and HD-DVD Comparison

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.

How to Copy HD-DVDs

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.