Blu-Ray (or HD-DVD) workflow on a Mac – client needs a disc this week.

[Eric Pautsch]

Nope…DVDSP doesn’t support the new burners yet. You can burn a Red Laser disc using the HD-DVD format with DVDSP but they have had problems with the new Toshiba update plus your limited on space.

HD DVD (Blu Ray /HDDVD)is not available yet to general professionals like you or me…so hang on – it will come soon enough …maybe :):)

[Tip Mcpartland]

Paul,

I can offer some insight — the Sony player works very, very well and the BD output is visually identical to your NLE timeline’s output. I burned from a 720P source (JVC HD100 acquisition).

I am using PC however, but I would be shocked it it didn’t work just as well on the Mac. The bundled application works perfectly and is ridiculously easy, although I did not create an elaborate menu system, etc. For simple playback, it’s just a few clicks once you’ve rendered a file to the appropriate format, in my case as I recall it was m2t. $699 at newegg.com.

The only issue would be playback on a consumer BD player — hopefully the BD-R or BD-RE discs will play in the Samsung, which has come down in price, or if you can wait, buy the Sony as it will no doubt be better (due November 13th).

As of now there is no HD-DVD burner, which is too bad as players as more reasonable and format more sorted out. Oddly enough, the HD-DVD blank discs are for sale, for example they are on the shelves at Fry’s Electronics and listed at many on-line stores. You would think that this would indicate a burner was forthcoming, but so far no announcements other than a Japan-only $3,000 appliance.

Tip McPartland

[Tip Mcpartland]

In the first line of my last post I mentioned the Sony player, I meant to say Sony burner.

[Chris Borjis]

[Tip McPartland] “The only issue would be playback on a consumer BD player — hopefully the BD-R or BD-RE discs will play in the Samsung,”

I’ve often read over at the avs forums that the Samsung will not play back recordable BD titles.

How long is your piece?

I have some experience doing HD-DVD’s in Dvdstudio pro and they will playback from the Toshiba just fine as long as the firmware is 1.xx and not upgraded to 2.0 However, you can use ulead’s hd-dvd creation software and the burned disc will work just fine in the Toshiba with 2.0 firmware. according to the folks over at the avs forums.

[Noah Kadner]

Isn’t it amazing how quickly formats go from drawing board to “client needs it this week.” How did they even know they needed it? 🙂

-Noah

[Wts(jmanz)]

Tip,

Could you tell me what software would play the blu-ray disc on the Mac?

Paul,

Burning HD discs for consistant, consumer playback on either platform is NOT ready for prime time. It’s barely ready for the Hollywood big boys.

I have made and played several HD-DVD’s by burning HD content onto standard red laser (which is not the blue laser media that will come out with the HD-DVD burners some time next year) media and have played them on the Toshiba player. They use mpeg2, which is basically a direct transfer of the m2t(which is a mpeg file format) files from an HDV camcorder. They will also play on an Apple, since the Apple software dvd player will playback HD-DVD discs (not Blu-Ray).

There are no Blu-Ray burner interfaces that I know of for the Mac currently, although I am sure they will be since Apple is a major player in the Blu-Ray format. There are no authoring apps on the Mac side that will author a Blu-Ray disc. There are some entry level applications that come bundled with the Blu-Ray burners to create Blu-Ray recordable discs–but then again you are limited to a very few number of computers that actually have a Blu-Ray burner on them; and just about as few Blu-Ray set top players that from reports don’t play back recordables, or are at least unreliable.

IMO, I wouldn’t invest a ton of money on either of the formats hoping that you picked wisely when stuff starts rolling out early next year.

Jim

[Tip Mcpartland]

This drive by Logitech is reputed to be a Mac burner, and if so it would be a good one since it has 50 GB dual layer recording. I didn’t read the article yet so I can’t jot down the release date.

https://www.macnn.com/articles/06/08/02/first.mac.blu.ray.drive/

Tip McPartland

[Wts(jmanz)]

That was an August post, I haven’t seen any actual release of a Mac burner from a reputable company–but I sure could be wrong.

The Blu-Ray burners for PC’s came out earlier this summer–but no real software to author, and no reliable way of watching recordable discs on set top players. Basically they offered little more than a means of high capacity optical data storage. Just because there is a “Mac” burner, doesn’t mean you can actually make Blu-Ray discs for set top playback. My previously posted reservations still stand.

Jim

[Tip Mcpartland]

Jim,

Fair enough, I haven’t been able to try the one disc I made on a set-top player, so I certainly can’t disagree with you. But I would be ticked off at Sony if that was the case.

Tip

[Chris Borjis]

The next version of Toast (8 i think) will support blu-ray burning
and drag and drop functionality (treat it like a hard drive)

Its also supposed to have some very simple authoring tool.