Writing HD movies to SD DVDs to play in a PS3

Question

I'm a little confused, I read earlier that Toast 9 can write HD video to SD DVDs which can then be played on Blu Ray Players. Is this true?
This would be fantastic, as it would save me the expense of having to buy a Blu Ray Burner and the Media. I realise that I would only get 40mins of HD on a SD Dual Layer DVD but that would be enough for my needs.
Can DVD Studio Pro 4 do this?
Many thanks
Mark

Answer 1

Zak Ray wrote:
If you're writing to an SD-DVD, you're going to get an SD product.
It's a question of definitions.
A DVD-Video disc could really be viewed as just a DVD-ROM disc with a specific set of folders and files which a DVD-Video disc player assumes are present. Likewise, the various HD formats have specific folder and file structures.
Some BluRay players, including the PS3, support reading HD content from a DVD-ROM disc. In the case of the PS3, it doesn't seem to matter if you use DVD-R, +R, -RW or +RW. The PS3 plays content back from the disc at full quality, because the disc is again just viewed as a series of files and folders. Roxio Toast claims to be able to write such a thing, though I should think that if you got the correct encoding parameters and file structure it would be entirely possible to burn yourself such a disc without spending any money - see below. With the right software you can even get chapter points (honoured by the PS3, at least).
Example (with Windows software, but runs under WINE - see later):
http://www.bitburners.com/articles/convert-mkv-files-to-blu-ray-or-avchd-for-pla ystation-3-using-tsmuxer/4019/
You're quite right in that it's not an "SD-DVD" but technically that's an acronym someone just made up - where taken literally, "SD" would of course mean standard definition only. But a DVD as simply a storage device is entirely capable of carrying MPEG 2 or H264 encoded HD material and some stand-alone devices are capable of playing it back.
In some respects, it's not dissimilar from the way that some standard definition DVD players will play DivX these days. The DivX files are stored on a DVD, but it's not an MPEG 2 DVD-Video disc.
I just successfully ran a test of tsMuxeR GUI under Darwine 1.1.9 from:
http://www.kronenberg.org/darwine/
...so you run the Windows software using WINE on OS X. You don't need Windows. It turns out that ImgBurn works under Darwine too, although it can't write to a real disc - you can write an image file instead, then burn the image using whatever you like (e.g. Disk Utility). Leopard supports UDF 2.50 but I can't find a free OS X DVD burner application which lets me specify a precise UDF version, hence the ImgBurn work-around. I just tested this with some H264 data and it worked, though it's very sensitive to frame rate and audio CODEC.
To get at a data format which the tsMuxeR software understands I used the also-Windows "YAMB" which again runs under Wine. Download the Zip version of it, unzip, download MP4Box, copy the MP4Box data into the YAMB directory, run YAMB, load your MP4 or MOV file and export the file's elementary streams, which you can then load into tsMuxeR. Fiddly, time consuming, but successful.
http://yamb.unite-video.com/download.html
http://kurtnoise.free.fr/mp4tools/
If your only target is the PS3 enough then why bother with complex Blu-ray structures? Just create a bog standard data DVD with a folder called "VIDEO" (capitals) and your video files inside it. Assuming the CODECs are all good, the PS3 will play it. You can do exactly the same thing on a USB memory stick or SD/CF memory card too, which is a lot quicker than messing around burning DVDs.