HD-XA1 HD-DVD Player

Does anyone know if it's possible to create content with DVD Studio Pro 4 as HD-DVD format, and watch on the newly released Toshiba HD-DVD player? I thought perhaps it would be possible for shorter content to be shown on a standard DVD-R, otherwise, is there a HD-DVD writer out yet?

I'm wondering the same thing. I actually brought an HD-DVD made with DVD STudio Pro (HDV Footage I've shot and edited in FCP 5) to Best Buy but their demo model wouldn't eject the disc it was playing! No matter what we tried, it wouldn't eject. I couldn't try my disc in it. Sooo...I tried playing a store bought HD-DVD (Apollo 13 rented from Netflix) on my MAC drive and it won't work. Won't load at all, just ejects after several minutes.

I can put about 30 minutes of HD material on a standard DVD. It looks great and plays fine when played on the same drive to my 23" Cinemascreen. I thought it was supposed to be compatible with the HD-DVD format but maybe not.

Yes you can.

I have the Toshiba, and you can put about 20-23 minutes of HD content on a red laser disc. You have to understand that the red laser media is not what HD disc's are supposed to be on, so one can't expect too much. Menus will display, but the overlays do not--so it's really not worth making menus. H264 discs (and I haven't tried one yet myself) supposedly don't play. Mpeg ones do, and the quality is spectacular.

I shoot in HDV and capture the content to hard drive on my PC (actually my Windows partition on my MacBook Pro) with HDV splitter--which will capture the m2t files by scene. I then use StreamClip (on the Mac side--you can use StreamClip on either side, but you can only do a batch file with the Mac version) to separate the m2v and aiff files from the m2t program stream. These files will import directly into DVDSP 4. You can set your chapter marks (which are obeyed when played on the Toshiba) and build/format/burn and watch. They look great, and I'm excited to be able to put more content on and add chapter menus/etc. I'm all set to make the conversion to HD full bore, the SD discs looked great in the past, but not once you've had a chance to see it side by side with HD.

Jim

Trai Forrester said on one of the boards that Toshiba players will play H.264 encoded material. You just have to keep it at safe bitrate of 9-12 Mbps.
MPEG-2 HD encoded material plays fine with Toshibas and even at high bit rates, and it is actually easier for the player to decode than H.264.



Alex Asp/Solaris Digital Ltd.