Burning 720p to NON Blu Ray disk using Architect

[Ron Ressler]

I think what mixed me up was the player’s use of the term upscaling.
On the one hand it represents itself as an HDMI 1080p yet according to what you’re telling me, it does not actually play a true HD disk. It simply upscales a lesser dimension to the HDTV as full 1080p.

Is my conclusion accurate?

[Eric Pautsch]

It will upscale a DVD to 1080p and it will play your 720p data disc but that’s not the issue. The problem is what format are you going to provide customers?

You need to make a Bluray if you want to provide HD to the widest customers base

[Ron Ressler]

Well, at this point I feel I have to simply work under the assumption that the typical HDMI players will upscale and customers
will see it in the best HD I can offer. Also I can burn a blu ray
version for those that have it.

Let me ask you this; In terms of rendering a video for a normal DVD, expecting it to be played on typical HDTV, should I render it in widescreen NTSC or 720p (with an understanding it will be scaled down)? I ask because I feel a scaled down version might give me a crisper image (as pixel compression sometimes does) but also I am concerned about the proper screen size for the HDTV. I don’t
know is NTSC widescreen will fit the HDTV as perfectly as 720 would.

[Dave Haynie]

[Ron Ressler] “I just bought a Philips HD player, a typical player I got from Best Buys. It supports about everything except Blu Ray. I want to render .AVI 720p files and burn to DVDs. I do not want to use Blu Ray because my productions are not that long and I want to be able to sell my DVDs without “player-limitation”.”

Well, you’re already asking for the worst kind of “player-limitation” here. AVI is just a file wrapper — you can put most anything inside it. A PC can, of course, load up new video CODECs for support different AVI file contents. A DVD player cannot. Most DVD players don’t support any kind of AVI file. Those that do may differ in what they support: standard definition DV, DivX (which comes in several different formats), etc.

You can put anything you like on a DVD… it’s just a data disc. However, DVD players only know how to auto-run DVD-Video formats, for the most part. A DVD-Video in NTSC can be 720×480, or a couple of lower resolutions. That’s it. You can put other files on the DVD and most DVD players will just ignore them, but they won’t decide to just automatically play some random AVI file.

[Ron Ressler] “I’ve been reading into the specs of DVD Architect 5.0 and all I see is Blu Ray this/that. WILL 5.0 allow me to burn my 720p .AVI to a leading brand DL DVD, which would then be playable on my Philips or any common HD player?”

DVD Architect, like pretty much all DVD/BD authoring programs, only makes legal formats. You can make a DVD-Video file structure or a Blu-ray file structure. DVD Architect will happily burn the DVD file structure for you on to an appropriate DVD blank. It can also burn a Blu-ray file structure to a BD-R or an appropriate DVD, if the content is small enough. However, no DVD players and even most Blu-ray players will not play a BD file structure burned onto a DVD. They just won’t.

No DVD players but most Blu-ray players WILL play a DVD formatted as an AVCHD disc. AVCHD is, of course, the camcorder format derived from Blu-ray, but not identical to Blu-ray. DVD Architect will not create an AVCHD file structure, but you can create a simple one from the appropriate AVC files, using open source tools. But given that this only plays on Blu-ray players (or PCs with Blu-ray player software), you might as well just distribute on Blu-ray.

Before Blu-ray, I had a red-laser DVD player from Japan, one made by a company called IOData, that could actually play lower complexity HD formats. It could auto-play Microsoft’s WMV/HD format, and if I made a “hybrid” disc… basically the file for both DVD and WMV/HD, it would offer me the choice of which format to play. This would play as a DVD in pretty much every other DVD or Blu-ray player known to mankind, though it would play on Windows PCs. Sometimes. Clearly not something I ought to charge people for.

Given that some DVD players have trouble playing DVD-DL/DVD+DL discs, these discs are way more expensive than DVD5s or even BD25s, you’d be way, way better off doing it the way Hollywood does: sell a 2-disc set, one DVD, one BD. That’s the only way you’re going to be able to get HD video to any but the very fringe of users.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Your best render will be rendering MPEG-2 (widescreen, assuming its show in HD) from your original sources. There is always a small loss in quality going through multiple rendering steps… original -> 480p is better than original -> 720p -> 480p.

-Dave

[Dave Haynie]

Upscaling means the player plays a normal everyday 480i or 480p video from a normal everyday DVD, but runs it through some realtime video DSP algorithms to “upscale” to 1080i or 1080p. What this means is that, first, there’s an resolution upscale, followed by some line detection and sharpening algorithms, maybe some magical proprietary stuff, to make your eye think the DVD is higher resolution that it actually is.

Every HDTV does the same thing when presented with material that’s not in its native screen resolution. However, particularly in the past, HDTVs often had just plain bad upscaling algorithms. So DVD players included presumably better ones. At least, that’s the nice and useful explanation. The other explanation is that DVD player manufacturers needed a new thing every year to make their DVD players sound better than last year’s. So one year they added 480p output, another they added HDMI with upscaling, then Blu-ray… pretty much a feature of all DVD players over $50 these days, and finally, “smartTV”… they also hook to the internet and let you watch YouTube or Netflix or whatever.

Upscaling really can be a nice thing, when done well. I’ve been using my Sony PS3 as my primary DVD/BD player since it came out. At some point along the way, they updated the upscaling algorithm, and it was a noticeable improvement. But upscaling is all post-processing, it has nothing to do with what a player will play, only how it can deliver it to your TV.

-Dave

[Miguel Almanza]

1) Will Architect 5.0 allow me to burn a 720p to a DL DVD?
Yes. It depends also on your DVD burner’s capabilities.

2) Will a DL DVD maintain 720p or downsize it to 480?
A DL DVD just means two layers of capacity (4.7Gb times two for a total of about 9.4 Gb of capacity). The maintaining of 720p or 480p depends on the authoring program or how you rendered the video. Standard DVD is 720p.

3) If I can in fact burn it to the DL and the DL does keeps it
at 720p, will it be playable on a typical (non blue ray)
HD player?
Yes, but again, it will depend on external factors like authoring software or rendering. A dual-layer DVD with 720p footage will play like a 720p-footage DVD on capable players. There are progressive-scan and “upscale” DVD players, but they will not play BLU-ray or High Definition streams.

I saw a bit of the answers and I think you may be confused with HD (1080×720 and above) and SD/DVD (720×480) dimensions of video. I hope I understood your questions correctly.

[Dave Haynie]

[Miguel Almanza] “1) Will Architect 5.0 allow me to burn a 720p to a DL DVD?
Yes. It depends also on your DVD burner’s capabilities.”

That is incorrect. The DVD-Video format does not support 720p video. You could burn a short Blu-ray to a DVD5 or DVD9 disc, using the Blu-ray supported 720p formats (1280x720p60, 1280x720p50, or 1280x720p24) but it would not play in any DVD player. And virtually no Blu-ray players.

[Miguel Almanza] “2) Will a DL DVD maintain 720p or downsize it to 480?
A DL DVD just means two layers of capacity (4.7Gb times two for a total of about 9.4 Gb of capacity). The maintaining of 720p or 480p depends on the authoring program or how you rendered the video. Standard DVD is 720p.”

Most of that is incorrect. DVD supports a number of resolutions. For NTSC, the highest resolutions are 720x480i60 or 720x480p24; in PAL, you can do 720x576i50. That’s it… no 720p to be found (try not to confuse horizontal vs. vertical resolution… we’re usually talking about vertical resolution, and always when only one dimension is quoted).

[Miguel Almanza] “3) If I can in fact burn it to the DL and the DL does keeps it
at 720p, will it be playable on a typical (non blue ray)
HD player?
Yes, but again, it will depend on external factors like authoring software or rendering. A dual-layer DVD with 720p footage will play like a 720p-footage DVD on capable players. There are progressive-scan and “upscale” DVD players, but they will not play BLU-ray or High Definition streams. “

The disc size has nothing to do with the data format. There is no data format that will play at 720p (which again means 1280×720, eg, base-level high definition) on standard DVD players. DVD Architect will not create a DVD-Video format in 720p. If you give it a 720p video source file, it will re-encode based on project settings to one of the aforementioned 480i/p or 576i formats.

[Miguel Almanza] “I saw a bit of the answers and I think you may be confused with HD (1080×720 and above) and SD/DVD (720×480) dimensions of video. I hope I understood your questions correctly.”

I’m not sure he’s the only one confused. There is no 1080×720 format, either. Standard Blu-ray resolutions including 1920x1080i60, 1920x1080i50, 1920x1080p24, 1440x1080i60, 1440x1080i50, 1440x1080p24, 1280x720p60, 1280x720p50, and 1280x720p24. Also supported are DVD legacy resolutions at 720x480i60 and 720x576i50.

-Dave

[Ron Ressler]

Dave,

if Miguel is incorrect, I’m very happy you responded (no disrespect to you Miguel). It’s just that so much of what Miguel said is what I wanted to hear yet very contrary to the other responses I received.

Dave, here is the question; A CD-Rom certainly does not care about any file specifications when it comes to saving a data-file. Why should a DVD offer a restriction on dimension?

This is why I opened this post on the question of Architect. I just assumed the authoring software makes the dimension-decisions.

What exactly is it about the physical DVD that’s halting a larger dimension, that even the authoring software can not override it? And if the answer is format-coding, what’s preventing anyone of the many DVD disk manufacturers from simply re-coding to allow the same dimensions as the original video file?

My logic is telling me its about the authoring software yet my post-responses are telling me its the disk. I just want to know how and why.

Thanks,

Ron

[Miguel Almanza]

Dave, your response is way more accurate than mine. I misread the beginning part. It was about 720p for high definition and I was thinking standard DVD definition. I think that the only thing I said right in all that was the capacity of the dual-layer disc.

No offense taken because he’s right, Ron.