HD DVD

It is only a matter of time now for them to come out with a program that would backup HD-DVD onto double layer DVD media to be playable on standalone HD-DVD player. Definitely HD-DVD would enter mainstream this shopping season.

For now creating 3x DVD involves

• transcoding using x264 at lower bitrates
• modifying stream a bit with x264info (adding 3:2 pulldown flag for 29.97i)
• building image with Sonic Scenarist
• burning ISO.

For progressive material I guess x264info step could be skipped. AC3 audio could just be copied, so I guess it all boils down to building image with Scenarist and transcoding from 3.5xT (0.285xRT) for 720p to 7.1xT (0.14xRT) for 1080p on the 2nd pass (on MacBook it would be 3xT(0.3xRT) and 5xT(0.2xRT) respectively), so 1.5 hour material would take upto 2*1.5h*3.5xT~10 hrs for 720p and 2*1.5h*5xT~15 hrs for 1080p to transcode. Again, computers gotta become twice as fast before that type of processing would become practical. It would be fun to try however – because the size would be limited by a bit less then 4GB (say 4.2GB – size of AC3 to be more exact) that means bitrates of upto 4000*8/(1.5h*60*60)~5.9Mbps – one could fit HD content on even single layer DVD.