Has anyone burned HD material to Blue Ray or HD?

[Jetstream]

The burners have been out for awhile, and yes they are expensive, but who has extracted and burned to BD/HD?

Any problems/glitches?

How does the end result look and sound?

What burning software was used?

I ask because no matter how powerful and clean running the PC is there is always a danger of loosing archived material.

Occasionally I will get a bsod when working with a large file. The drives I have are fairly new 400gb SATA. The error is "an improperly dismounted disk". The only way to fix is to reformat which means losing all data on the drive.

This error started for me a couple years back when I started using SATA drives. I've tried different drive brands, a few high end motherboards, and other things and still have this problem.

I imagine the cost of an BD/HDburner and blank discs is still the largest hurdle to overcome.

[captain_video]

I haven't invested in either type of HD burner yet but I have created my own homebrew HD-DVDs using the process outlined at the AVSForum in the HD DVD software section. You can extract HD files and process them using Ulead's DVD Movie Factory 5 or 6 and create HD-DVDs that you can burn using a standard DVD burner which will play back in HD on an HD-DVD player. I've done it with files from HDTivos and local OTA HD broadcasts using my HTPC and the results look great.

I have all six Star Wars movies that were broadcast recently on HBO-HD and lots of others as well. The only caveat is that you're limited to anywhere from 30-60 minutes per single-sided DVD-R disc. Many people have reported success using dual layer discs but I'm too cheap to waste the money when single layer discs are but a fraction of the cost.

[Jetstream]

Wow, that's pretty interesting! I'll check into that. I would never have thought it possible.

Are you saying that when you play it back this way and check the video bitrate, it's the same as the high def capture?

And does it also retain the aspect ratio?

I still can't believe it.

[bcc]

I know you acknowledged blu-ray/HD disks as expensive, but I think if you do the cost-benefit analysis, you'll see that it makes no sense to archive to those disks at this time. Not only is it too high from a $/GB perspective vs hard-disks, but also the time to transfer is worse, and the time to author to blu-ray/HD makes it practically out of the question for personal use.

Yes HD-dvd is a lot cooler, but it's probably most practical to get to the bottom of your disk errors and backup to offline disks.

The HD to low-def recordable DVD process that Captain Video mentioned is detailed here:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=705146

Tho tempting to play with, I personally also think HD to offline hard disks is more practical than the process described over at avsform.

[Jetstream]

Did I misunderstand something here? He said,

" create HD-DVDs that you can burn using a standard DVD burner which will play back in HD on an HD-DVD player"

I took this to mean it retains the high def. If not I already know how to convert HD material to SD and burn it.

I've been reading the other thread and it looks to me like it retains the HD format, that is 16:9 aspect ratio high video and audio bitrate.

[bcc]

Did I misunderstand something here? He said,

" create HD-DVDs that you can burn using a standard DVD burner which will play back in HD on an HD-DVD player"

I took this to mean it retains the high def. If not I already know how to convert HD material to SD and burn it.

Right, HD to standard DVD+/-R media (which is ordinarly SD but not used in that way in this case). That is what I meant as well.

[ciper]

There is a very useful tool that you can download that uses this process to display test images in HD on your display allowing you to properly calibrate it, similar to video essentials! I know its on the avs forums somewhere but at the moment I cannot find it.

[captain_video]

I know you acknowledged blu-ray/HD disks as expensive, but I think if you do the cost-benefit analysis, you'll see that it makes no sense to archive to those disks at this time. Not only is it too high from a $/GB perspective vs hard-disks, but also the time to transfer is worse, and the time to author to blu-ray/HD makes it practically out of the question for personal use.

Yes HD-dvd is a lot cooler, but it's probably most practical to get to the bottom of your disk errors and backup to offline disks.

The HD to low-def recordable DVD process that Captain Video mentioned is detailed here:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=705146

Tho tempting to play with, I personally also think HD to offline hard disks is more practical than the process described over at avsform.

While I agree that it is far easier to archive HD-DVDs or other HD content to a large disc, it tends to get a bit expensive in a hurry, even at today's hard drive prices. I put a 750-GB drive in my HTPC for the purpose of ripping HD-DVDs for playback at my leisure and it was full in very short order. You can buy an awful lot of DVD-R discs for the same price I paid for the 750GB drive. The thought of archiving anything to HD-DVD or BD recordable discs never even entered my mind at the current prices for blank media, not to mention what the burners themselves cost.

The process outlined at the AVSForum actually takes less time to author an HD-DVD than it does for my standard DVDs of the same size. Granted, I have to split up most HD movies into 2 or 3 discs but I can still author 3 HD-DVDs with DVD Movie Factory 6 in about the same time as it used to take to author a single DVD in DVD-Lab.

I only archive movies I'm likely to watch more than once so it's not like I'm starting a huge library of HD-DVDs. For single viewings I just rip the discs to my HTPC's drive and watch them when I want or leave them on the Tivo for later viewing. Afterwards, I delete the movies to make room for new ones. The one problem with ripping HD-DVDs is that there's currently no method to strip out just the main movie like we can do with regular DVDs. A typical HD-DVD can take up anywhere from about 15-30GB, which is a lot of real estate.

The X-Box 360 HD-DVD add-on drive has dropped to $150 at Best Buy so it's an inexpensive entry into the world of HD-DVDs. If you've got an HTPC then there's no reason not to add one to your setup for the best quality playback possible. BD drives are also available for the PC but they're still a bit more expensive. If there was a method to burn content to DVD-Rs that would play on a BD player then I'd probably be trying that as well. Unfortunately, that's not likely to happen due to the format in which BD discs are made. I don't believe BD readers are capable of reading HD content authored with a red laser.

[Jetstream]

The disk problem has only happened with SATA drives, but it has happened with a few different motherboards and many different installations windows XP. I cannot trust it to store important data. Every time I think it's gone it rears it's ugly head and wipes out a few hundred gigabytes of data.

I've tried having the paging file on a different partition, a different drive, different cluster size. 64K has been reported as the best for video.

This happens on fairly new drives with no errors present. I can build my own computers and keep them running pretty clean, but as far as trusting 750gb worth of important data, I can't.

[bcc]

It is not normal to have such problems with SATA drives. If it were, no businesses would be able to rely upon their computer systems for work.

Perhaps you're using nvidia based chipsets in your motherboards which have known issues with their SATA implementation.

I still maintain it'd be in your best interest to get to the bottom of your disk errors, instead of trying to move to optical format for your bits, which presents its own set of reliability challenges.

[dburckh]

I've had problems with NVidia SATA as well. I found the key was to only install the driver the MB manufacturer recommends. If you install the newer drivers directly from NVidia you can get corruption. After I just started using the one on the manufacturer's website/MB CD, I haven't had issues.

Also on nforce3 RAID was completely unreliable, nforce4 seems to be better if you follow the caveat above.