Downloading now yipee, thanks sony

Well.. I made a Blu-Ray disc with DVDA 5. No problems.

The 41 minute video took less than hour to render in Vegas8.0b. I put in 66 chapter markers.

It took about 42 minutes to create the disc. I gave up on animated (motion) buttons though, it would have taken four hours for DVDA 5 to render them! So I went with 66 static chapter buttons.

I burned it to an LG BD-RE 2x disc. The burner is an LG GGW-H20L. My PC is has a Intel Q9450 2.66ghz CPU, 8GB DDR2800 RAM and Windows Vista64. My video source is a Sony HDR-SR7.

Nedski

P.S. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that it plays fine on my PC using Cyberlink PowerDVD Ultra. I don't have a set top Blu-Ray player.

Got it... and I'm rendering away. While that's going, let's get to the gnarly questions.

I now finally have this all-Sony toolchain for Blu-Ray... HVR-A1 camcorder, Vegas, DVD Architect, and PS3. Now, here's the big question... can I actually author a BDMV with this stuff that will really play on the PS3 (firmware 2.3).

There seems to be a great deal of confusion about compatibility around the net, and I have yet to find any definitive answer. I did a DVD last month, something fairly simple, ported it to the relatively horrible "Nero Vision", cranked out a BDMV disc, and it fails... on the PS3 and couple of other recently updated Blu-Ray players. Works like a champ on my desktop under PowerDVD... but that's kind of missing the mark.

I gather from the settings DVDA5 can also do "AVCHD-DVD" (eg, BDMV file structure on a DVD-R), which is cool, but I'm certainly hoping real BD-R/RE isn't throwing we small videographers under the bus out of fear of thieves.

I know the rumors don't scan completely... if BD-R/RE didn't play on standard decks, that would also throw BD-R/RE camcorders under the bus, I believe.. and that's would be a shame... DVD-R camcorders might be the most popular consumer format now, but the 1.4/2.6GB makes it kind of silly. But you could have a pretty nice prosumer unit using 8cm BD-Rs (I guess Hitachi is the only one now, but eventually...). As the world leader in DVD cams, you'd think Sony would have considered this one, too. And wouldn't that force BD camcorders to be write-only (since every BD camcorder is also a BD player)... :-)

Anyway, I'm just hoping there's some knowledge here, some testing on actual current decks (the earlier ones were supposedly allowing BDMV on BD-R, but the rumor mill claims this is being removed), etc. Hopefully just seeing Nero issues, or even an evil brand of BD-R (I think these are Rietek)... I'm tired of hand-editing overcompressed WMVHD DVDs just to get something disc shaped playing my HD shoots (my old IOData AVeL Linkplayer 2 handles this format).

No worries.. well, some.

The PS3 vs. BD vs. Nero thing was, in fact, Nero. The PS3 with the latest software (2.3) ran my BD-R just dandy, once authored in DVDA-5. I'm pretty sure that the PS3 is functioning as a development platform for Sony and Blu-Ray, particularly on the 1.1 and 2.0 specs (no HW changes needed). So one should expect (hope? pray?) that what the PS3 does today, other BD players will do in the future.

As mentioned elsewhere, DVDA's "Blu-Ray on DVD" isn't AVCHD compliant for some odd reason, it's exactly what it claims to be: Blu-Ray on DVD. This is kind of a silly format, if players such as the PS3 refuse to accept it as a valid BDMV disc. There's quite a bit of utility TODAY in supporting AVCHD discs as a transitional format: they play on BD players, they can at least technically play on most folks' PCs.

If BD is a smashing success, the BD-Rs will get cheap, everyone will have a player, and no one will care about "Blu-Ray on DVD" or AVCHD. But that might not be for half a decade...