Blu Ray = 480P?

Dudeman44 wrote on 6/13/2009, 10:40 PM
I just recorded my first Blu Ray disc, but when I played it back on my Sony PS3 connected to a Sharp HDTV, the TV showed it as a 480P playback disc. Not sure where the issue is. My source AVI file is 1 hour video, 560Gigs in size at 1920x1080 as created by Vegas Pro 8.1. During the record setup phase in DVDA 5.0b I selected Blu Ray and even manually chose 1920x1080 as the video size. It recorded to an .iso file with no errors, the finished .iso size is about 10gigs, but it's apparently not HD. Anyone what went wrong? My PS3 plays commercail Blu Ray DVDs at 1080P just fine. Does DVDA create log files while recording to help in debugging? If so, where would they be located?

Comments

Dudeman44 wrote on 6/17/2009, 10:02 PM
Thanks for the reply, but I found my problem and here's good advice to anyone else that runs into this oversite. I was focused on choosing 1920x1080 as the output in both Vegas and DVDA, what I overlooked was the letter "i" and "P" following the 1080 - very important difference! The PS3 doesn't support 1080i and, therefor, plays your BluRay back at 480P; DOH!! When I chose the 1920x1080P 24fps setting - boom - there it was in HD on the screen! Problem solved.

The only downside is that I'm not a fan of 24P because of the choppy look you get when you pan the camera in a scene. Oh well, I'll have to learn to live with it. Maybe it will look better if the raw footage is shot at 24fps instead of 30fps, I'll try that next.
DualEdge wrote on 7/13/2009, 3:28 PM
Okay, so does this mean that the PS3 is not capable of playback at 1920x1080 is 60i or 50i? I am in the same boat here in that my footage doesn't look nearly as good in 24p as it does in 60i.
csc0709 wrote on 7/14/2009, 1:35 PM
The PS3 is required to playback 1920x1080 interlaced as it is part of the blu-ray mandatory spec. So yes it will playback 1920x1080 60i. 60i by the way is also the same as 29.97i. The PS3 will NOT playback 1920x1080 60p as there is no allowable spec for 29.97p, 30p, (60p). The only progressive format the blu-ray supports is 24p (23.976) and only at 16:9 at 720 or 1080. It does not support progressive playback at 720x480.
DualEdge wrote on 7/14/2009, 2:13 PM
Thanks for the reply. I'll try burning a disc at 1920x1080 @ 60i and see what happens. My source footage is 1440x1080, but my Vegas/DVDA timelines are set to 1920x1080, so I hope that wouldn't change anything.
csc0709 wrote on 7/14/2009, 7:01 PM
If your source footage is 1440x1080, Blu-Ray does support that in both interlace and progressive (23.976 only), but only using the AVC MPEG-4 codec or the VC-1 codec. You cannot put it on blu-ray at that resolution using the MPEG-2 codec as it is not supported. You would have to encode 1920x1080 if you want to use MPEG-2.

Word of advice: If you source footage is 60i (29.97) or 60p (29.97) never encode it at a framerate of 23.976. I notice that was what some of the above posts were doing. You will get very jerky video if you do. Only use the 23.976 framerate if your source is in that framerate, or your converting from a PAL framerate (25fps) or something.

Here is a kicker. As you may know, the only way to get 23.976 720x480 progressive material on DVD is by applying a 2:3 pulldown (DVD wont support 23.976 material natively.) Since DVD allows 29.97 progressive not a problem. Well, Blu-Ray doesn't support 720x480 23.976 progressive nor 29.97 progressive in any resolution, thus if you have a 4:3 video in 720x480 at 23.976 progressive and want to include it on Blu-Ray you have to interlace it or matte it in a 1920x1080 frame or 1280x720 frame.
MPM wrote on 7/15/2009, 8:49 AM
"thus if you have a 4:3 video in 720x480 at 23.976 progressive and want to include it on Blu-Ray you have to interlace it or matte it in a 1920x1080 frame or 1280x720 frame."

How will a player handle it if you simply add pull-down, as on a std DVD? The mpg2 flags will show interlaced, & I wouldn't think the player could tell the difference. There's not a ton of BD players out there yet, so not a lot of collected experience -- I'm just being curious. :-)
csc0709 wrote on 7/15/2009, 9:47 AM
I have a Sony BDP-S550 and it treats it as if it were 480p and it skips and the audio is out of synch and will not playback smoothly. The problem with matting it in at 1920x1080 or 1280x720 frame is people connecting a blu-ray player to a 4:3 set and playing back will get a windowboxed image. So, the only solution I have found is to convert it to 29.97 interlaced.

If anyone finds a way to do this, I would be interested in knowing.
csc0709 wrote on 7/16/2009, 8:17 AM
Now that I think about it, the Blu-Ray format is not very 4x3 friendly at all. There are times when you can have a hi-def picture that is 4x3 as opposed to 16x9. However, the only way to put it on Blu-Ray is to matte it as the only 4x3 option is 720x480. I guess it wouldn't really matter assuming that everyone with a Blu-Ray player is connected to a widescree television, but that may not always be the case. A lot of older filmed based tv shows are an example of potential hi-def material, but only 4x3 not 16x9. So, I guess the industry standard will be to matte it in a 1920x1080 frame?