[alpine101]

I was fortunate enough to pick up one of the de-stock Toshiba EP30s from Amazon before they put the price back up to £69.99. It arrived yesterday and, as well as upscaling ordinary DVDs as well as my Oppo, it produces very nice quality output on the HD DVDS (2 free ones come with the player, and I have a few others as well).
I used Ulead VS11.5 to create a test HDDVD from my SD1 output on an ordinary DVD disk, the Toshiba does see it as an HDDVD and outputs at top quality.

[senu]

Well there is some use for HD DVD it seems
Even as an upscaling DVD player!

[alpine101]

In my enthusiasm, I may have been a little premature here.

I've been comparing the output of the AVCHD file that VS11 produces with the output of the HDDVD it can make. I'm playing the AVHCD file through my PCH, and the quality is 100%. But the quality of the HDDVD is somewhat lower and not as good as the player can produce. I've found the reason for this. VS11, for some reason, does not allow smart rendering if you want to write an HDDVD disk. It insists on transcoding to a high definition mpeg using its own encoder. Even at the best settings this results in a visible resolution drop compared to the AVCHD output. The transcoding is totally unnecessary, since, though HDDVD has the option of using older style encoding, it is specced to use H264 just like BD.... The resultant old style files take up lots more space on the disk too!

[senu]

Well that is better than using HDV for HD DVD which if PAL 50i will have to be transcoded to 60i
Im not sure what Movie Factory 6 plus uses but being Ulead ( corel) i wont be surprised if thay are similar.
Saying that, Im not sure why but AVCHD discs produced from AVCHD material in Nero Vision 4 seem to be transcoded to m2t files..

[alpine101]

I've sorted this!!!
Remember the awful Panasonic HD Writer application that I've written about disparagingly... I recalled a post on another forum that this actually did a conversion as well.
So, this time rather than importing files into VS11.5 straight from the SD card, I let the HD Writer do its job of creating the folder structure on the PC disk and copying the files across.
This results in a BDMV folder with M2TS files in it, rather than the MTS files on the SD card.
Created a new project in VS11, imported the MT2S files, and it smart rendered OK. Selected 'HDDVD' as the output disk, and off it went, made a set of EVO files on the DVD. This plays fine on the Toshiba, it's seen as an HDDVD, and there's no loss of quality from the original clips.

I recall from a post somewhere that the difference between MTS and M2TS is that the packets in the M2TS structure are a couple of bytes longer to cater for a time code.

[senu]

Well done. How does that differ from AVCHD structure?

[alpine101]

Originally Posted by senu

Well done. How does that differ from AVCHD structure?

The AVCHD structure appears to be the same as the BD structure, top level BDMV, then the almost unused directory structure until you get down to the STREAMS dir where the clips are.
HDDVDs consist simply of a top level HVDVD directory, with some BUPS and IFOs, just like DVDs and the HD output as EVO files. On some of my commercial HDDVDs these are 13 or 14GBs each. The Tosh reports the EVOs as AVC encoded.

[senu]

I seem to recall that with the HG10, the HDD had this same structure with the AVCHD files within the "stream folder"
If you copy the whole thing ( not just the mts) files and ask Ulead to import them do you think you would be duplicating HD writers function?
I mean why are mts and m2ts so different??
Incidentally it is m2ts that Nero creates for AVCHD discs from the mts files

[alpine101]

Originally Posted by senu

I seem to recall that with the HG10, the HDD had this same structure with the AVCHD files within the "stream folder"
If you copy the whole thing ( not just the mts) files and ask Ulead to import them do you think you would be duplicating HD writers function?
I mean why are mts and m2ts so different??
Incidentally it is m2ts that Nero creates for AVCHD discs from the mts files

No I don't think it would be duplicating. The M2TS files are a little bigger than the MTS files from which they're made. I think that's because of the space added for time codes. For all I know timecodes of some sort have been added by HD Writer and not just space for them. Somewhere when I first started looking at AVCHD, I found some info about the differences and something about there being an ability to record packets out of sequence within the files, so that if the SD card write was slow, the playback/further encoder could resequence.

This might of course be a load of cobblers, but the M2Ts files are certainly slightly bigger.

The way I got here was some info on the Ulead forums suggesting use of Nero, because VisionEdit or whatever it's called does produce M2TS files from the raw MTSs that can be read into VS11 and allows it to make an AVC HD DVD. That is what prompted me to try the M2TS method directly into VS.

[senu]

Interesting and thanks for that.
Sadly as HD DVD players die off, of limited value
What happens with the mts files in an AVCHD Disc ? Do they also need to be m2ts?

[Waveform]

Originally Posted by senu

Interesting and thanks for that.
Sadly as HD DVD players die off, of limited value

Not sure the players are all set to suddenly die off - I was hoping mine was going to be doing a great job of upscaling and playing my current disks for a year or so yet

I can't get my HDDVD disk created in Ulead to play in my EP30 though - I've tried it a few times with different approaches and each time I get "this disk is not a valid blah blah etc". Which type of DVD are you using Alpine?

[senu]

Originally Posted by Waveform

Not sure the players are all set to suddenly die off - I was hoping mine was going to be doing a great job of upscaling and playing my current disks for a year or so yet

Im hoping the owners ( I would get one if i could.. they are dead cheap now) will enjoy them for even longer.
My point is that
Production of New players and HD DVD discs has stopped
And
It wont be long before you cant get any new hardware .. or software