Previously, I ran a BD-R using Nero, which failed on the PS3. I re-ran it this week from DVDA 5 (my original DVD was authored using DVDA 4.5, so it was really just the rendering time) and HURRAY! This one plays on the PS3, with the 2.3 firmware, just fine. Just adding a practical datapoint here.

I think you are slightly wrong. The "close to" can be removed. If you support creating BDMV disks, the creation of an AVCHD disk is entirely trivial. It's omission in DVDA is absurd and yet another strong indication of problems at SCS.

The coding time, I agree, is trivial. But it also has to be tested, and that's where I got the "close to trivial" claim. You believe you follow a spec completely, but with things of this complexity, the only real way to tell is to test. This means authoring a number of test disc (or more correctly, cutting down some of the existing DVDA 5 Blu-Ray test discs), playing these on a variety of commercial DVD players. Then chopping to 8cm discs and ensuring they play on camcorders. That's not difficult work, but if they don't do it, they're not supporting the format properly.

As I have said elsewhere, from what I have seen of DVDA 5, the total amount of work that went into upgrading from 4.5 to 5, assuming it is not re-written from scratch for some reason or other, is a handful of man-months. I think I said two to be facetious, but it is not a lot more. Given that it is a long time in the making that means that SCS has close to zero resources dedicated to it.

I don't agree here... there was considerable work to do to add and test the BD stuff, even if they didn't alter one single authoring ability of DVDA. However, one would have hoped this work started in parallel with the Vegas 8 work, so I think we come to the same conclusions.. why is this coming out 8 months after Vegas 8?

I might give them some slack if it was a matter of dealing with the shifting sands of the Blu-Ray spec. But I don't see any support for 1.1 or 2.0 features, or for that matter, even 1.0 features like BD-Java coding. In fact, what they've basically done in DVDA 5 is mapped the basic DVD features to work in BD. That's certainly not automatic, nor even as easy as moving DVD components to HD-DVD would have been. And it's precisely the first level of support that I would have asked for... right now, my first goal is to make DVDs and BDs from the same project, since I'm not expecting BD to replace DVD for most users anytime soon.

In truth, DVDA was never really at the level of other SCS tools, in terms of high-end features. That's been kind of ok... early on, I was using Pinnacle Impression for that sort of thing. Once DVDA hit a threshold of ability, I dumped Impression like a radioactive pineapple... buggiest piece of software on the planet, even if fairly powerful (very low-level, too, but you could do pretty much anything, which is still occasionally an issue in DVDA). I'm not sure if this ever changes, particularly under Sony... they probably don't want DVDA to become serious competition for BluPrint, for example.

I just took my DVDA 5 project that I burned to a BD-RE disc to SEARS to try on their Bluray players, not a single one of the 3 players would read the disc, My PS3 plays it perfectly, they really need to update the firmware on these players....The brands were Sony, Samsung and Panasonic....of course with Sears it hard to tell how long they have been on display....

why is this coming out 8 months after Vegas 8?

The only logical answer to that question is "They don't have any resources working on this stuff, it was done by someone who cared in his (assume gender neutrality here please) spare time".

hey probably don't want DVDA to become serious competition for BluPrint, for example.

Honestly, I don't think this is the issue. The SCS people probably barely know the Blue Print guys (or know of them) and vice-versa. The reason is much simpler. There is not enough resources to do this well, and the ones that are there are still scarred from the Sony acquisition.I've been through enough acquisitions to know what happens in such situations. It is rarely good.

So, back to the OP.
I have not been able to burn to standard DVD's just yet.
I purchased a LG Blu ray writer H20L, and at first I thought the drive was bad, as it refused to burn to DVD's.
Then I inserted the BD-RE re-writeable Blu-Ray disc that came with the drive and voila, I was able to get a blu ray disc burned, and it even played nicely on my Sony BDS300 Blu-Ray player

I am not sure why it does not burn to the standard DVD, as the test project was less than 3 Gig.
Does it require DVD-DL ?
Does it require ultra High quality DVD's (Verbatim, or Tayo Yuden)?
I used memorex DVD-R

I will test some more this weekend, and repoprt results (if any)

Ted

I've been using Nero to burn disc instead of DVDA ever since I started out with DVDA1 or 2. I did the same with the BD ISO created by DVDA5, and Nero reported a successful burn. I haven't had a chance to try to play the disc back on a BD player, however.

"So, back to the OP.
I have not been able to burn to standard DVD's just yet.
I purchased a LG Blu ray writer H20L, and at first I thought the drive was bad, as it refused to burn to DVD's.
Then I inserted the BD-RE re-writeable Blu-Ray disc that came with the drive and voila, I was able to get a blu ray disc burned, and it even played nicely on my Sony BDS300 Blu-Ray player

I am not sure why it does not burn to the standard DVD, as the test project was less than 3 Gig.
Does it require DVD-DL ?
Does it require ultra High quality DVD's (Verbatim, or Tayo Yuden)?
I used memorex DVD-R"

I was able to burn single layer DVDs, except that you either have to use an AVC stream compressed with Vegas, or force DVDA to recompress to AVC in case you have a souce MPEG2 stream, because even if it says it doesn't require recompression, when you play it back all you get is a video that will play at 1 frame per second.

Perhaps you didn't succeed because you didn't set the project options to burn to a 4.7 disc instead of the default 25.

Memorex always worked very well for me. I never had a coaster with them, which is more than I can say for Sony, especially DVD+RWs.

Good point Sebaz, but I went through that one already.
Found out you cant prepare BD using the 4.7G setting, or you'll get a buffer underrun error. You need to set it for 25G. Then after the prepare is finished, switch the properties back to 4.7 then try to burn to DVD. I also did this but no go?
I tried to burn the iso to DVD using Cyberlink iso burning software which came with the drive, but again no burn on 4.7G (it did burn to BD-RE though)
To me it seems like some media problem, eventhough Memorex has ALWAYS worked for me before.
I'll try some different media this weekend.


Ted

I rendered a Bluray video in VegasPro8 compliant for DVDA5, and want to burn it to DVD. How much Bluray video can I store to a standard DVD?