I have recently bought some HD-DVD disks as they're getting very cheap now that HD-DVD has been killed off in favour of Blu-Ray.
I have an HD capable TV with an XVID capable DVD player built into it. And I have an HD-DVD reader (& DVD writer) to plug into my PC. At the moment I haven't connected it up because it's SATA based and I've run out of SATA connectors so some juggling is going to be required (or I can stick it into a Windows PC).
So, before I go too far, does anyone have any hints as to how I can rip HD-DVD content and convert it into XVID to burn back to a DVD? I want to basically get a full DVD in MPEG4 format from an HD-DVD.
Will I even be able to read the HD-DVD in Linux? (My desktop is Ubuntu 8.10.)
I don't have any other HD-DVD player so buying the disks was a bit of a gamble really :-)
2008/11/10 Mark Rogers mark@quarella.co.uk:
Will I even be able to read the HD-DVD in Linux? (My desktop is Ubuntu 8.10.)
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=hd+dvd+linux
Top hit leads to: http://digg.com/linux_unix/Playing_HD_DVD_On_Linux
which leads directly to: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats/BluRayAndHDDVD
Share and enjoy, Tim.
Tim Green wrote:
2008/11/10 Mark Rogers mark@quarella.co.uk:
Will I even be able to read the HD-DVD in Linux? (My desktop is Ubuntu 8.10.)
Hmm, OK well that answers the easy bit :-) (And yes, instead of just adding that afterthought into the last email I should have Googled first.)
So it sounds like I should be able to rip and playback the disks with Ubuntu, albeit I may have some hoops to jump through. It looks like I'm going to have a lot more fun with the transcoding side of things though.
The more research I do the more confusing it gets. For example, I hadn't realised that the native video format on HD disks is H.264 which means that there is potentially 30GB of video already compressed to a level I'm unlike to be able to better, so transcoding is going to be pretty limited in what it can achieve.
What I don't understand is that HD quality surely isn't *that* much better than DVD quality? A DVD can be transcoded to around 1GB without loss of quality as an XVID, which means doubling the resolution should still comfortably fit a film on a DVD, so why the need for something 7+ times bigger?
Is it really just about having a new standard for locking content down and preventing us watching films on FOSS platforms unless we obtain them via BitTorrent?
What I don't understand is that HD quality surely isn't *that* much better than DVD quality? A DVD can be transcoded to around 1GB without loss of quality as an XVID, which means doubling the resolution should still comfortably fit a film on a DVD, so why the need for something 7+ times bigger?
I think most dvds display at 720×576, which equates to 414720 pixels and fits onto a 4.7 GB disc, hd dvd i think is 1920×1080, or 2073600 pixels which is about 5 times the number of pixels per frame.
Ricky Bruce wrote:
I think most dvds display at 720×576, which equates to 414720 pixels and fits onto a 4.7 GB disc, hd dvd i think is 1920×1080, or 2073600 pixels which is about 5 times the number of pixels per frame.
Yes, but DVD's use MPEG2 which is pitiful compression compared with MPEG4 (XVID etc and H.264).
A typical DVD will transcode down to around 1GB which should make it possible to fit an HD film (with extras) comfortably onto a dual layer DVD (and *almost* onto a single layer disk).
HD-DVD and Blu-Ray do mean that a typical 2-disk set will fit onto a single disk but in my experience 2-disk sets are done for marketing anyway (ie 2-disks are better than one).
On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 10:59:33AM +0000, Mark Rogers wrote:
What I don't understand is that HD quality surely isn't *that* much better than DVD quality? A DVD can be transcoded to around 1GB without loss of quality as an XVID, which means doubling the resolution should still comfortably fit a film on a DVD, so why the need for something 7+ times bigger?
Doubling the resolution makes the output 4 times as big... Anyhow, DVD is 720x576 (ish) and a full HD film will be 1920x1080 so actually 5 times as big just in pixel count (ish). Then you have to take into account that most HD-DVD discs have much better audio soundtracks options than normal DVD soundtracks, so these will take up more space. Oh, and both the audio and video will most likely be encoded at a higher bitrate than on a DVD encoding of the film so that it fills the disc, if the space is there then why not use it? When you consider it in those terms you have to think that the encoding technology must be much better as if it was encoded using DVD technology you'd need a 35GB disc vs. the 30GB that HD-DVD gives you.
I can also assure you that playing a full HD source on a good full HD panel you can really see the difference, I've compared a couple of the firesale HD-DVD's that I purchased against the DVD versions of the same films and there is quite a big difference. I also note that both my kids who will undoubtedly have much better eyesight than me will sit and watch entire episodes of things like Planet Earth by the BBC when it's being played from HD-DVD.
I'd also disagree about being able to re-encode a DVD down to 1GB with XVID with no loss of quality, as everything I've ever watched that has been encoded this way looks somewhere about the same level of quality as Freeview ;)
Adam
Adam Bower wrote:
Doubling the resolution makes the output 4 times as big...
That's where my 1GB XVID -> full DVD (4.7GB XVID) calculation came from.
Then you have to take into account that most HD-DVD discs have much better audio soundtracks options than normal DVD soundtracks, so these will take up more space.
But a dual-layer DVD is 9GB so still using MPEG4 should be capable of fitting it all onto a single disk.
I can also assure you that playing a full HD source on a good full HD panel you can really see the difference,
Oh I know that there is a hell of an improvement, but it's not just the resolutions that have improved - MPEG4 is a hell of a lot better than MPEG2 too!
I'd also disagree about being able to re-encode a DVD down to 1GB with XVID with no loss of quality, as everything I've ever watched that has been encoded this way looks somewhere about the same level of quality as Freeview ;)
I agree on this but it is largely (I believe) down to the lossy -> lossy transcoding. I would expect (but don't have any figures to prove it) that from the original source, encoding at the same playback quality, MPEG4 should result in a file around half the size of MPEG2. As far as I know most movie disks are only using single layer for the main feature, so that would mean a double-layer DVD should still hold HD quality using MPEG4, and be playable on cheap players. H.264 is considerably better than XVID, but my TV's built in player won't play H/264 :-(
Going beyond HD will need something new, but the combination of MPEG4 and dual layer disks ought to have been enough to delay that next step for some time yet. MPEG4 capable players are around £30 (I bought one in Tesco last week for £15, albeit without an HDMI output), HD (eg Blu-Ray) players are way more expensive and far more limited.
To return to my original questions, what I have is an HD capable TV with a built-in MPEG4 capable player. In order to watch HD-DVD's on that TV I either need to buy an HD-DVD player, which if I can find one will cost me about £100-150 from eBay, or I need to get the HD-DVD converted via my PC down to an MPEG4 file on a single DVD (it can be a dual layer disk). Given I paid no more than £3 for any of the disks, and given that I have an HD/Blu-Ray player waiting to be fitted into my PC, I would like to try that conversion. A loss in quality is acceptable, it should still give me a result way better than I can get from a standard DVD. After all it's only for playback on a TV in my bedroom, not in a home cinema!
On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 12:37:30PM +0000, Mark Rogers wrote:
Adam Bower wrote:
Then you have to take into account that most HD-DVD discs have much better audio soundtracks options than normal DVD soundtracks, so these will take up more space.
But a dual-layer DVD is 9GB so still using MPEG4 should be capable of fitting it all onto a single disk.
Dual layer dvd is more like 8.5GB, but the whole point of HD-DVD isn't to compress the crap out of everything so it looks crap. You could encode the video to fit on a single DVD but it would look rubbish, just because a particular codec *can* compress video so it is smaller doesn't mean it should be used to do so!
I think that the best you will see with like for like (quality wise) mpeg2 vs. mpeg4, that it would be half the file size for an mpeg4 encoded film compared to mpeg2. Given that the HD source already contains 5 times as much information in the first place compared to a DVD, let us play with some numbers.
Lets say that you have a decent DVD film with a film on that contains 6GB of data, with an HD-DVD because of the increase in resolution you will now have 5x6GB so you now have 30GB of data, you can encode that to half the size using mpeg4 before you will suffer a loss of quality, so you still need 15GB of space which won't fit on a DVD hence higher capacity systems are needed.
You also have to take into account that the video on a DVD is already compressed, that doesn't mean it actually looks good in the first place and couldn't have done with being a higher bitrate/quality but that wouldn't fit on the DVD so a compromise has already been made.
This is the point of HD-DVD/Blu-Ray that you don't have to compress the crap out of everything just to make it smaller so it fits on the disc. Some people appreciate quality and want it to look as much like the cinema as possible in their home theatre ;)
Oh, and you should have got an HD-DVD player when they were £70 with 5 free films included ;)
Adam
Adam Bower wrote:
You also have to take into account that the video on a DVD is already compressed, that doesn't mean it actually looks good in the first place and couldn't have done with being a higher bitrate/quality but that wouldn't fit on the DVD so a compromise has already been made.
OK, that's a fair point I hadn't thought about. Are movie DVDs actually running out of space inside even 4.7GB for the actual movie content? (Ignoring extras, menus, etc.)
Oh, and you should have got an HD-DVD player when they were £70 with 5 free films included ;)
Tell me about it :-(
On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 01:59:51PM +0000, Mark Rogers wrote:
OK, that's a fair point I hadn't thought about. Are movie DVDs actually running out of space inside even 4.7GB for the actual movie content? (Ignoring extras, menus, etc.)
I'd expect so if they are more than a couple of hours long and been encoded to high quality, In fact there is no reason to not use the entire capacity of the disk to give a higher bitrate copy. I quite often (at least I used to, not so sure with newer dvd players) notice changes between layers, usually about 2/3rd of the way through a film when it pauses for about .5 of a second when the player does some magic to read the 2nd layer.
Adam
Mark Rogers wrote:
Adam Bower wrote:
Oh, and you should have got an HD-DVD player when they were £70 with 5 free films included ;)
Tell me about it :-(
I just gave in and bought a second hand player off eBay for just over £100 delivered, with 2 free films (+Blue Planet which I wanted anyway), the very same Toshiba HD-EP30 that was available new for £70 as above.
Ah well, it's only money after all.
On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 09:40:13AM +0000, Mark Rogers wrote:
I just gave in and bought a second hand player off eBay for just over £100 delivered, with 2 free films (+Blue Planet which I wanted anyway), the very same Toshiba HD-EP30 that was available new for £70 as above.
Test the player lots when you get it, the first one I had would freeze up seemingly at random. I did call Toshiba and they sent out a replacement a few days later. Oh, and the HD-EP30 runs Linux too, but Toshiba are very naughty and don't seem to provide sources or any way in to the player. Also of note the new Panasonic tele I purchased the other month has a copy of the GPL built into the firmware menus under "license agreement" as it too also runs Linux (apparently), but the download link for the source is broken. Not that I can actually see a situation that I would want to try and update firmware with a custom build on something like a television ;)
Adam
Adam Bower wrote:
Test the player lots when you get it, the first one I had would freeze up seemingly at random.
Thanks for the tip, I will do. Do you have the latest firmware on yours?
Oh, and the HD-EP30 runs Linux too,
I just Googled for more info on this but couldn't find any obvious references?
Not that I can actually see a situation that I would want to try and update firmware with a custom build on something like a television ;)
On the contrary, I've often been frustrated by silly firmware bugs in consumer electronics that I'd have loved the opportunity to go and fix (or at least go looking). I figure that hardware development is pretty expensive and products often ship with relatively weak software simply to get the boxes shifted. Since the HD-EP30 has network capability, for example, it would be nice if it could stream video to/from another destination/source, but AFAIK this is not an option?
On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 01:33:23PM +0000, Mark Rogers wrote:
Adam Bower wrote:
Test the player lots when you get it, the first one I had would freeze up seemingly at random.
Thanks for the tip, I will do. Do you have the latest firmware on yours?
Erm, not sure. There were firmware problems and a new one was released recently. I know the new one shipped with the oldest firmware but I do have a rollback disc somewhere to use in case of problems.
Oh, and the HD-EP30 runs Linux too,
I just Googled for more info on this but couldn't find any obvious references?
Aye, says in License Agreement that comes with the player that portions of this that and the other are GPL software and that includes busybox and the linux kernel iirc.
Not that I can actually see a situation that I would want to try and update firmware with a custom build on something like a television ;)
On the contrary, I've often been frustrated by silly firmware bugs in consumer electronics that I'd have loved the opportunity to go and fix (or at least go looking). I figure that hardware development is pretty expensive and products often ship with relatively weak software simply to get the boxes shifted. Since the HD-EP30 has network capability, for example, it would be nice if it could stream video to/from another destination/source, but AFAIK this is not an option?
Isn't an option and tbh I don't think it ever would be. For consumer stuff like this having the source probably won't help as I imagine that the drivers for all of the hardware would require documentation that simply isn't going to be available to the end user. A bit like with Nvidia gfx cards and how ATI gfx used to be.
Adam
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Tim Green