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I was reading through some of Ken Stone's Final Cut Pro articles on his site this morning, and stumbled upon a How-To by Rick Young from MacVideo that takes us step by step through creating a Hi-Def DVD using standard DVD-G (DVD-5) 4.7GB media using DVD Studio Pro 4. I had no idea this was even possible. As he goes on to explain, they will only play back on Modern Macs (not in Set-Top HD-DVD players) - but hey, if you have an HD Cinema Display and a newish Mac - this is fantastic news!
You can read the whole How-To on Ken Stone's site.
From Rick's How-To: "According to legend and rumour it is possible to make High Definition DVDs onto regular 4.7GB DVD-Rs using a Mac with a DVD burner and DVD Studio Pro 4. Now if this were true then we could all get started knocking out HD DVDs straight away and stop waiting for Blu-ray to appear.
Reminds me of a time before DVD burners were widely available to the public. There was talk that one could take the disc out of DVD-Ram caddy, or record DVD content to CD, and then do something magical with the disc which, if you knew the secret formula, would then play in a DVD set-top player. Not sure that talk was true.
But what is true is that it is well and truly possible to make High Definition DVDs onto 4.7 GB DVD-R (type 5) discs which can then be played back on most modern Macs. Let me repeat modern Macs - so far I have achieved this using a 2.5 GHz dual G5 and a Black MacBook.
Creating HD DVDs
The first thing to understand about the process of creating HD DVDs is that it is remarkably similar to creating Standard Definition DVDs. The main difference is that the content is encoded at a higher bit-rate which therefore means you get less time for content on the disc. Expect to get just over 50 minutes of HD footage onto DVD-R (type 5). This applies for both 1920 x 1080 footage and 1280 x 720P. I've yet to try DVD+R or dual layer discs." Read More...
I've made these, and I got them to play in a Toshiba Set Top Player. I'm not sure why this article is even up.. it seems awfully redundant to me. I was able to create a working HD-DVD with digital audio stream that played back in a Toshiba player, using my Mac dual 2.3/ DVD SP 4x.
It can be done, but you are limited to 30mins or less of prgram due to disk size. The reason it works is that HD-DVD's and reg DVD's (SD) are made the same way and are using the same laser. Blu-Ray uses more data per disk and is thusly a much "newer" technology. Not to mention, the media and burners are way more expensive...