Again, Sony is beaten to market with someone else already offering their technology. The BD players from other manufacturers beat Sony to the market big time and now software companies are beating Sony to market again. Is anyone at Sony NOT asleep at the wheel?

So what have we learned throguh the DVDIt Pro offer? That Sony should be able to offer current V7+DVDA4 users reasonably priced upgrade for BD authoring features NOW or even free for the matter.

Now I truly miss SF and their vision to always stay ahead of the curve.

hmmm...i'm not so sure I call $800 "affordable". past experience with roxio software was that it played games with my OS. I think I'll wait to see what Ahead/NERO comes up with.

> hmmm...i'm not so sure I call $800 "affordable".

How about $39? That's how much Ulead DVD Movie Factory Plus cost and it appears to burn Blu-ray discs as one of it's new features and promises a free upgrade when HD DVD burners become available. ;-)

~jr

Well, not that I'm a huge fan of Sonic, but they do know more about DVD authoring than virtually anyone else. I'm sure DVDA will eventually support BluRay, but it's not a trivial thing to do.

.........but it's not a trivial thing to do.

I agree 100%, but just makes no sense to me that others have it and vegas doesn/t,, but hey I havent checked movie studio, hell wouldn't surprise me if it gets it before Vegas

The link says $499.99. How does that become $800?

Can you use any of these applications to burn BD player compatible disks to regular DVD-Rs? I'm finding that you can get really good looking HD mp4 playback at regular DVD data rates so it makes sense to me that this would be possible.

I found the answer:

From their FAQ:

Q.Can I put Blu-Ray content onto a DVD-R so I can save money on discs with DVDit Pro HD?

A.While DVDit Pro HD doesn’t expressly prevent you from burning Blu-ray content onto DVD-R, Blu-ray content on DVD-R is currently not compatible with BD players.

A good thing about this app is that it lets you author both BluRay and SD discs from the same project.

A bad thing is that you have limited compression options. For instance, it looks like only uncompressed audio is allowed so far.

I'll hold out a little longer and see what DVDA does with this.

I like how the Ulead Movie Factory lets you author both BluRay and HD-DVD discs. After all, the war is not won yet. Good price too.

How could a product the costs more than Vegas be considered affordable?

And it doesn't even do the most popular format for HD which is HD-DVD. Don't even go there if you are thinking Betaray, HD-DVD outsells it by far as evidenced by sales fiqures.

HD-DVD is the next generation format, and you don't have to pay $500 to use it. You can buy ULEAD DVD MF5 for $50 and starting punching out High Def HD-DVD's on regular DVD media today for pennies a disk with your existing burner, something the BetaRay can't and won't ever do.

BigRockies.com Your Home in the Rockies!

"You can buy ULEAD DVD MF5 for $50 and starting punching out High Def HD-DVD's on regular DVD media today for pennies a disk with your existing burner"

I wasn't aware of this. But aren't you limited to 4 gigs on regular DVD-R media?

What I like about BluRay is that you can create data discs capable of holding 25 or 50 gigs of data.

Can anyone make a recommendation on a low cost BluRay burner?

That's a new twist, things are getting very interesting.

JJK

hmmm...would be nice if i could burn HDV mpeg2 on a standard DVD, but, i don't think anyone can do this, certainly not Ulead MF5. DVD standards limit it to a max bitrate of 8M. Hi-def needs 18,000K.

Yes, you can burn HDV on a regular DVD using Ulead, but there are other third party apps involved, as well. It works on Apple intel computers and the Toshiba HD-DVD players, but I'm not sure what else. You need to use a patch called HDPatch, by TexMex, and burn using Nero 7. There is an extensive procedure listed over at the Avid Community Forums.

Blu-ray support on Ulead MF5 is EXTREMELY limited. It is basically burning a blu-ray compatible movie to disc from tape. A Blu-Ray DVR. We have the Ulead product and are VERY interested in the Sonic product.

Of course if Sony Madison would get on the bandwagon... Most of us can't afford (or even fully utilize) Blu-print.

I'm reading the fine print: only mpeg2 and uncompressed audio are available. I'll wait for something that gives me mpeg4 and data compressed audio.

If you can encode in MPEG4/AVC (H.264) you can get very nice looking high-def at 8 Mbps. Would be nice to be able to use that on standard DVD-R media, and it seems logical that eventually they will produce set-top players that would read it. At that point there would not be much real incentive to buy either HD-DVD or blu-ray media, from my point of view.

I can't imagine that once the cheap Chinese and Korean HD-DVD and BluRay start coming out, that most won't all just play mp4 files off a disc without any formatting whatsoever.

guys,
It seems to me that Blue ray is the more popular HD media. When I've talked to people who have NO VIDEO knowledge they all know what bluray is. No one has mentioned the other formats.

the PS3 has blue so thats a huge plus as PS3's hit the market.

Aug

Agree with jbeale. At 8 Mbps, one can get well over an hour on to a standard DVD, which is considerable!

I have just rendered out a 45 minute HDV video (HDR-FX1 source) to 8 Mbps 720p wmv9. This plays just fine from DVD-R to a 720p HDTV (on an SRDVD-100U). (There are some minor glitches which I attribute to the SRDVD-100U.)

Sony, you need to get with the program and upgrade DVD Architect to include authoring in both BD and HD DVD format to BD, HD DVD, and standard DVD media! And you need to include the more efficient encoding formats in this upgrade.

Actually, I wonder if it's really in the cards for Sony to go beyond authoring in BD format to BD media. Perhaps it's necessary to look to some third party not so directly invested in the BD/HD format war (like Sonic and/or Ulead?) to provide these capabilities.

rls

Well research has proven otherwise. HD DVD sales out number BD by a large margin.
The smartest thing Sony could do to give them a chance to win the format war is make tools available now to allow authoring to BD. The longer they screw around hoping to get $50k per license, the more market share they will lose. Studies have already shown that you can get the same quality using VC1/H.264 AVC on HD DVD that you get on BD using Mpeg-2.

IMO, the second that someone releases a quality HD DVD authoring tool, Sony will be dead in the water. What I cant seem to understand is that we are no longer tied to major studios and their releases. Indie film has taken over and the internet is becoming more and more a viable distribution outlet yet Sony seems to be banking on the studios still. It just seems that Sony is wanting to hold back the tools as long as they can to give the studios more of a chance to continue their domination before they open it up to the indies.

Well, the studios have better lawyers and more money to throw at them. They also have more money to throw at new toys.

I have to agree that I am gravely disappointed that DVDA4 doesn't have ANY next-gen support yet. It will be interesting to see if we have to wait until 5, or if there will be an upgrade or new build to support at least one of them.

Not disappointed enough to pass up the new product, though ;-) Quite a step up from the original DVDA. Love it.