HD & BLU RAY...can they be converted?

[DrTalk]

:doh: OK, so we got AnyDVD HD which obviously handles HD discs as well as Blu Ray discs. Now, this may be a noob question for someone who's been around as long as I have but, here it comes........can an HD or Blu Ray disc be converted to a normal DVD just like you can easily convert any 1 type of video file to another? Compression of video has ALWAYS been the big issue, but we've learned to live with it. Any thoughts?

Dr Talk

 

[Spanky]

I really doubt it, the HD movies I have vary from 20 few to up near 30 gigabytes in size and Blu-Ray can get up near 50 gigabytes. I won’t say it can’t be done, but it would take a butt load of compression to get it down to 8.5 gigabytes.

 

[DrTalk]

I really doubt it, the HD movies I have vary from 20 few to up near 30 gigabytes in size and Blu-Ray can get up near 50 gigabytes. I won’t say it can’t be done, but it would take a butt load of compression to get it down to 8.5 gigabytes.

Hey thanks Spanky! Yeah, I knew that file size was going to be the biggest concern. I was just entertaining the thought of how we can convert a .WAV file down to an .MP3 and still maintain good listening quality. I figured the same principal could possibly apply here. I'm not 100% convinced it cannot be done either, but, we may be just wasting our time as the switch to either HD or Blu Ray is inevitable. We're slaves to the manufacturers and studios unfortunately.

 

[Spanky]

I think you are right about that, I jumped on the HD bandwagon mostly because of James’s advice, I figure he should know. I’m building my library in HD hoping I haven’t picked a loser. Blockbuster announcing that they are backing and only renting Blu-Ray may change the course of the war. You never know, some young genius may come up with a way to extract just enough A/V to make DL back up from an HD disk?

 

[sej7278]

i think the only hope there is transcoding to h264, i've seen 4-8gb hd rips that look ok, although i doubt they came from full 50gb capacity disks.

 

[mike20021969]

I really doubt it, the HD movies I have vary from 20 few to up near 30 gigabytes in size and Blu-Ray can get up near 50 gigabytes. I won’t say it can’t be done, but it would take a butt load of compression to get it down to 8.5 gigabytes.

forget about cloning the hd or blu ray disc to ordinary dvd for a sec.
lets assume the hd/bluray feature is an an average 1 and three quater hour film.if an hd or bluray player has composite video out or scart (and why shouldnt it? we might not all have an hd telly at the moment),then it can be connected to a dvd recorder (if the output has CSS on it a little box of tricks might be needed too) and recorded onto a normal 4.7GB blank disc.
this means the hd/bluray player converts the output to composite video quality in the player itself obviously.

so i think software will soon be available to do it on a computer.
i download a high-definition clip off the microsoft website and converted it to wmv at 256kbps using sony vegas movie studio platinum 6 and it did it in next to no time.ok the clip was only about 2 minutes long and wasn't from a hd or bluray disc.but it was an HD clip.

 

[dburckh]

I've managed to convert a few HD DVD with XviD/MPG2 using this method. They aren't as good as the original, but they aren't bad.

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1076291#post1076291

The examples posted use -sameq, if you want to fit it to a DVD, you have to use -b xxx and figure out your target bitrate (remember to subtract the size of the audio!)

That thread also talks about converting to AVC, it a lot more complicated.

 

[diogen]

The main feature with one soundtrack (non-PCM) is around 20GB on both, HD and BD.
If you can live with a 720p re-encode, you won't have to sacrifice too much
to fit the result into DL DVD (8GB) or two SL DVD (8.7GB).

DIogen.

 

[dchard]

Need clarification

Fisrt we need to clarify what are we really want?

1. Split an HD/BD to DVD discs?

2. Convert the HD/BD disc's hidef video to a standar definition DVD (playable in any DVD standalone)?

3. Somehow recompress the HD/BD disc to fit on a DVD / DVD-DL and try to keep the high definition picture?

---------

1. is possible but I think an insane idea.

2. is not just possible but some riliz group working on standard DVDs, which has a HD or BD source. Very nice quality, but just standard definition, not HD.

3. Yes this is the way. Using x264 (an opensource AVC/H.264) encoder, it is possible to recompress >=1:45 movie to a single layer DVD in a very nice 720p quality with a Dolby soundtrack, or a 2 - 2:30 movie to a duallayer DVD with either DTS track in 720p (also very nice).

720p is not fullHD, but under 40" on a "just HD ready" (not fullHD) display, these are looks very fine.

But there is no "one-click" sollution for any point I described above.

Dchard

 

[Turtleggjp]

Tools are maturing that are allowing us to work with the formats on the HD discs. Once we can get an HD movie into our favorite encoding tools (AVI Synth and Virtual Dub for me), it can be down converted and recompressed into whatever format we want:

8.5GB for Dual Layer DVD using XviD/DivX or x264 etc. (might need downsampling).
4.7GB for Single Layer DVD using XviD/DivX or x264 etc. (most definitely will need downsampling).
720x480 MPEG2 for DVD video players (obviously downsampled).

Or in my case, I use a consistent quality method with XviD at full resolution. I did Transformers this way and it came out at just under 10GB at 1920x800 resolution (I cropped the black bars) and 640kbps dolby digital audio. This is not very easy to backup to DVDs, and Blu Ray discs are still too expensive, but that's my problem to deal with. Anyone else doing this could easily fit it to whatever size fits their needs by downsampling, higher compression, or different compression such as x264.

The part that needs to be overcome right now is handling the new container formats (.EVO and .M2TS) and the new video and audio codecs found inside:

Video:
MPEG2 is easy (little difference from handling DVD).
VC-1 is trickier, but I've done it.
AVC is getting better thanks to the up and coming DGAVCIndex/DGAVCDecode tool.

Audio:
Dolby Digital Plus is close but not perfect.
Dolby TrueHD is reportedly working well.
DTS-HD/Master Audio can also work too.

As long as Slysoft keeps enabling us to decrypt the discs, the tools to work on converting them to other formats will continue to get better. Eventually, it will become as easy as DVDs are today, but probably not for another year or so.

 

[3r1c]

dont use divx or xvid for hd. they were not made with HD in mind and dont give good results on high resolution material.

with x264 you can fit a whole movie on a 8gb dvd at reasonable quality.

if your going to convert it to dvd quality, just copy the dvd, you will get better results then downscaling HD.

 

[dburckh]

dont use divx or xvid for hd. they were not made with HD in mind and dont give good results on high resolution material.

with x264 you can fit a whole movie on a 8gb dvd at reasonable quality.

if your going to convert it to dvd quality, just copy the dvd, you will get better results then downscaling HD.

I think the people that wrote at DivXHD will differ with you on that.

I've done some H263 (XviD) conversions and the quality is better than DVD. Some media centers and most PCs can play 1080p H263 quite nicely. H264 is somewhat better and will be eventually become the standard. For now it takes a big box and/or hardware decoding to play it. Further it takes me about 24 hours to encode H264 vs. 8 with H263.

 

[JackPalance]

I currently use TMPGEnc Express which is fantastic, and converts to WMV -
WMV can quite happily cope with HD, but I'm still trying to find something as easy as TMPGEnc Xpress to do the same job with Blu Ray discs

 

[Turtleggjp]

I think the people that wrote at DivXHD will differ with you on that.

I've done some H263 (XviD) conversions and the quality is better than DVD. Some media centers and most PCs can play 1080p H263 quite nicely. H264 is somewhat better and will be eventually become the standard. For now it takes a big box and/or hardware decoding to play it. Further it takes me about 24 hours to encode H264 vs. 8 with H263.

I agree. The faster decoding of H.263 outweighs its larger size for me. Plus, I've done some recoding of my XviD 1080p TV shows lately (down to 720p), and it is pretty trivial and fast. Plus, I really liked the simple installation of the old DivX 3.11 and how doing so gave you both encoding and decoding ability. XviD also installs this way. With x264, you only get an encoder, and both it and the decoder are still under development. Perhaps some day when CPUs are powerful enough to decocde H.264 content as easily as they can do H.263 content today, I'll consider using x264. As it is, I used DivX 3.11 up until I started working with HD material. Only then did I look into a replacement codec for my stuff.

Bottom line: Both can do the job just fine, use what works best for you.

 

[Tegeril]

My ideal endgame scenario is a Hard Drive storage method that takes HDDVDs and converts them to an 8-12GB 1080p h.264 file depending on duration/etc, like CRF.

This would allow me to save anywhere from 50 to 66% of the space currently being eaten by my backups and would make the files more easily playable and accessible in Windows Media Center. I've never been interested in special features, and while the features on HDDVD are neat, I can grab the disc if I really care.

I'd love for someone to lay out the steps to do this now, but I know it's not easy at all and requires many programs, particularly with me using Vista x64.

 

[DonCarlos]

I have got a Question. Is it possible to get some audio streams or subtitle streams out of the .EVO .m2ts files?

I know there are tools like Tsremux and EVOdemux but when I use them the time of the movie is screwd up(perhaps it is a use mistake). For example if you use Harry Potter 5 with Tsremux the movie can be ripped down from 29Gb to 19Gb. That would be a really good solution you do not have to accept a loss of quality but can save space because I just want an german and english audio stream.

So could anybody give me a tutorial how to use these tools?(I did not finde one in doom9 or places like that)Or is there another way to get it done what I like to do?

I know Slysoft plans to release something like an CloneDVD HD which could do this but when it will be released is not clear....

 

[mick2006]

I have got a Question. Is it possible to get some audio streams or subtitle streams out of the .EVO .m2ts files?

I know there are tools like Tsremux and EVOdemux but when I use them the time of the movie is screwd up(perhaps it is a use mistake). For example if you use Harry Potter 5 with Tsremux the movie can be ripped down from 29Gb to 19Gb. That would be a really good solution you do not have to accept a loss of quality but can save space because I just want an german and english audio stream.

So could anybody give me a tutorial how to use these tools?(I did not finde one in doom9 or places like that)Or is there another way to get it done what I like to do?

I know Slysoft plans to release something like an CloneDVD HD which could do this but when it will be released is not clear....

I use Tsremux all the time with both HD DVD's and blu ray discs. And by the way, when cutting out stuff you don't want (like extra audio tracks) there is no loss in quality, you will only lose quality when you compress files. Tsremux does no compression. What exactly do you want to accomplish and I'm sure someone here can help you out. These tools can be used in different ways to meet specific goals.

 

[DonCarlos]

Thank you for your reply.

It is good to know that it does no compression.

The thing I would like to do is to have the same Blu ray afterwards the only difference between before using Tsremux is that the main movie just has one audio stream. I tried it with Harry Potter 5 but when it is finished the movie time doesn't work anymore...So could you please give me lesson how to use it the right way?

 

[Turtleggjp]

Which output format did you use? When I tested it, I did so with the first 4 or 5 files from Meet The Robinsons that were binary copied together. I used the M2TS output option (192 byte packets) not the Blu Ray option. This got rid of the discontinuity errors at the seams, and allowed Media Player Classic to successfully play the file all the way through (otherwise it would freeze at these points). PowerDVD doesn't like the resulting M2TS file in that it only plays video with no sound, but it does this with the originals too.

As far as having the same Blu Ray afterwards, I don't know how that would work with something like Meet the Robinsons, since there are about 30-35 M2TS files that make up the entire movie. You might need to do each file seperately. If you movie is just one big M2TS file, then you might be ok just running it through TSRemux. My experience with Blu Ray is pretty limited right now though, as I just got my LG drive. Hope that helps.

 

[DonCarlos]

It helps al little. I tried it with all three output options. And everytime the same happened. My thought were, I rip the whole Blu ray to the Harddrive. Then I look for the movie file(s) and run them through Tsremux. After I did that I delete the original files in the Blu ray folder and replace them with the new ones. When I now open this Blu ray on the harddrive in PowerDVD I thought it would be the same as the ripped one, but without the audio streams I don't like. Ok when I open the Blu ray on the harddrive and get to the main movie the movie time is screwed up, also when I click the right mouse button and choose the audiostreams the german stream is under french and so on. So I only mess everything up. I know this should not be the case but what can I do? I think the blu ray structre of the ripped one is not "ready" for the new files so it screws it. I don't know what I could do against this......So I think that what I want to do at the moment is impossible.