x264 is useless for HD DVD

X264 would be totally useless for HD DVD for two reasons

• h264 stream generated by x264 is not supported by DVD Studio Pro. There are two problems here – the encoder do not set 3:2 pulldown flag and do not set resolution properly, then mp4box tops it off muxing into incompatible .mp4. DVD Studio cannot work with anything but .mp4 or .mov, so the story pretty much ends here, however there is more
• x264 only encodes progressive frames. Since HD DVD spec (and/or DVD Studio) only support progressive at 23.978 with 3:2 pulldown to 29.97 that means that HDCAM captured 29.97i video would need to have FPS converted to 23.98 before encoding and this creates motion artifacts.

So despite being 2.5 times slower and a lot worse quality wise, Apple’s Compressor is still the only working HD DVD solution. It does stretch 480p SD to 16:9 (I wonder if 960x720 would be supported without stretching), so HD DVD is useless to store AVC encoded SD and thus, for SD the storage is still interlaced MPEG-2 encoded DVD and that still leaves open the question – what to do with PAL->NTSC and 25p 640x480 camera movies (and what to do with Tape captures).

BTW, my DVD player doesn’t play DVD-RW and XBOX do not properly work with 29.97i and 23.98p, so still need to burn test movie on DVD+/-R at 23.98p and check it.

Finally, EyeTV on Apple captures SD with audio problems (both out of sync and pop/click artifacts). So first do check Pinnacle captured SD to make sure there is no clicks (sync seems to be fine) and burn a DVD at 23.98p at about 4Mbps (2+hrs per single layer) which seems to be more then enough for Tape captures. (Both Pinnacle and EyeTV capture at 8Mbps max). And yeah, surprisingly enough TMPGEnc takes 0.5xRT (2xT) to do SD encodes or no faster then x264 could do H264.