They have had the HD DVD experience and they know only too well that despite the wishes of it's supporters high def sales are very small.
People might not want to hear it but total high def sales are minute compared to total DVD sales.
Why should Toshiba put resources into high def when it's clear SD DVD and it's upscaling/upconverting varients are, by far, the major sellers?
@ Junkie
If you want you can burn the movies to a BD disc (the disc format is dead but the movie format is not, it's the same 3 codecs, VC-1, AVC & MPEG2, mandated to Blu-ray).
Moving content from HD DVD straight to BD sans menus is fairly straightforward but it is way, way, way, way too complicated for mere mortals to do. The tools are unforgiving, unintuitive, complicated, hard to find and generally require a very deep knowledge of codecs, muxing and so on.
At its most basic, moving content is a matter of remuxing the H264 / AC3 content from EVO to TS and hey presto it works. Other video / audio formats and subtitles add additional complexity. Menus and interactive features are not portal and won't be short of somebody writing a runtime for HDi in BD-J. This is quite feasible (e.g. HDi uses ECMAScript & XML and there are JS engines like Rhino in Java). But I doubt it would happen any time soon unless you plonked down tens of thousands for a commercially supported tool.
Another problem is that BD recordable media is still fairly expensive which means splitting content over DVDs or transcoding it to a smaller size. This is a very time consuming process and adds another hideous layer of complexity. It takes a lot of trial and error to make work.
Bottom line, yes you can transfer HD DVD movie content (I do it myself), but its not simple or fast.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Multi-format-mayhem @ Sep 30th 2008 2:08PM
Toshiba are not pretending anything.
They have had the HD DVD experience and they know only too well that despite the wishes of it's supporters high def sales are very small.
People might not want to hear it but total high def sales are minute compared to total DVD sales.
Why should Toshiba put resources into high def when it's clear SD DVD and it's upscaling/upconverting varients are, by far, the major sellers?
@ Junkie
If you want you can burn the movies to a BD disc (the disc format is dead but the movie format is not, it's the same 3 codecs, VC-1, AVC & MPEG2, mandated to Blu-ray).
TrentD @ Sep 30th 2008 3:51PM
Eh, it's not quite that simple. HD DVD uses HDi, while Blu-ray uses BD-Java for the menus and interactivity, so those don't port directly over.
Multi-format-mayhem @ Sep 30th 2008 6:45PM
I didn't say it was simple, but it is easy and a lot of people are doing it.
A decent PC & a few simple software tools are all that is needed if you can get as far a ripping the movie from the HD DVD disc.
WebDev511 @ Sep 30th 2008 8:08PM
@TrentD
Apparently Universal just built a BD-Java class to interpret and render HDi, so they still author in HDi.
No, I don't have a source that will validate that claim, but I've yet to see Universal release a BD title that ventured beyond the scope of HDi.
DrXym @ Oct 1st 2008 8:56AM
Moving content from HD DVD straight to BD sans menus is fairly straightforward but it is way, way, way, way too complicated for mere mortals to do. The tools are unforgiving, unintuitive, complicated, hard to find and generally require a very deep knowledge of codecs, muxing and so on.
At its most basic, moving content is a matter of remuxing the H264 / AC3 content from EVO to TS and hey presto it works. Other video / audio formats and subtitles add additional complexity. Menus and interactive features are not portal and won't be short of somebody writing a runtime for HDi in BD-J. This is quite feasible (e.g. HDi uses ECMAScript & XML and there are JS engines like Rhino in Java). But I doubt it would happen any time soon unless you plonked down tens of thousands for a commercially supported tool.
Another problem is that BD recordable media is still fairly expensive which means splitting content over DVDs or transcoding it to a smaller size. This is a very time consuming process and adds another hideous layer of complexity. It takes a lot of trial and error to make work.
Bottom line, yes you can transfer HD DVD movie content (I do it myself), but its not simple or fast.