[analogue SPRINKLES]

Pioneer BDP-95FD review - Engadget HD

Boot times are out of control, 1 minute to eject from off, 35 seconds to load a disc

$1000 and it is way slower, no wireless and no 2.0 ready compared to a PS3. No that is not directed at you Eug just pointing out what a steal us PS3 owners got for our money.

[Eug]

WTF are they thinking?

[brassplayersrock²]

oh this is intimidating:

[Eug]

The thing on the bottom isn't the player. It's the receiver.

[brassplayersrock²]

i know that.. i was just commenting on the pic

[Eug]

So, I have confirmed that these HD DVD on DVD-R burned by Roxio Toast work fine in DVD Player.app... with one caveat.

It skips on my iMac, when played from the internal laptop slot-load drive. I guess the drive can't handle the transfer rate, cuz I burned it 26 Mbps MPEG2. However, whenI loaded the disc into an external Firewire desktop DVD drive, it worked fine.

Similarly, it skipped on my Toshiba standalone, presumably also because it couldn't handle the transfer rate for DVD media.

I will try again with H.264, at a much lower bitrate this time.

[- - e r i k - -]

Originally Posted by brassplayersrock² 

oh this is intimidating:

Ah. Designed by a true engineer.

[cjrivera]

Originally Posted by Eug 

So, I have confirmed that these HD DVD on DVD-R burned by Roxio Toast work fine in DVD Player.app... with one caveat.

It skips on my iMac, when played from the internal laptop slot-load drive. I guess the drive can't handle the transfer rate, cuz I burned it 26 Mbps MPEG2. However, whenI loaded the disc into an external Firewire desktop DVD drive, it worked fine.

Similarly, it skipped on my Toshiba standalone, presumably also because it couldn't handle the transfer rate for DVD media.

I will try again with H.264, at a much lower bitrate this time.

Is the picture quality that of DVD or more like HD-DVD?

[Eug]

Originally Posted by cjrivera 

Is the picture quality that of DVD or more like HD-DVD?

The output from Toast with MPEG2 looks like broadcast HD. ie. Noticeably better than DVD, but not as good as real HD DVD.

Note however, that the source I used wasn't the greatest in the first place. They were Quicktime HD videos which are reasonably good HD, but definitely not up to HD DVD quality.

[starman]

Burning the end of the Superbowl as a BR now. I'll report what happens.

[starman]

Ok, I burned the last part of the Superbowl that I downloaded from the TiVo Series 3. 33:34 and 720p. I was able to get Toast 9 to burn it to a DVD+R as a "Blu-Ray Video". The result?

Apple's DVD player crashed. Great.
I popped it in the PS3 and the machine saw it as a "Data Disc". I went into the directory structure to "Stream" and played the video. Boom....video worked perfectly.

[analogue SPRINKLES]

Uh ya, I think it is better if you just stream whatever these video's are from one of your Mac's. This disk burning is almost silly in this day and age.

[starman]

Originally Posted by analogue SPRINKLES 

Uh ya, I think it is better if you just stream whatever these video's are from one of your Mac's. This disk burning is almost silly in this day and age.

haha

[climber]

Originally Posted by analogue SPRINKLES 

Uh ya, I think it is better if you just stream whatever these video's are from one of your Mac's. This disk burning is almost silly in this day and age.

Yea, it is so easy to send home movies to the relatives on a hard drive.

[analogue SPRINKLES]

Originally Posted by climber 

Yea, it is so easy to send home movies to the relatives on a hard drive.

Ya everyones grandma has an HD set that wants you to burn HD video's to regular old DVD's.
Bitch please. I was talking about burning disks just to watch it on your own equipment 20 feet away.

Nothing wrong with burning DVD's for grandma if she no longer has VHS.

[starman]

*ahem*

Anyway, I know that burning BR discs are like some kind of exact science so tomorrow I'll try again with an HD-DVD formatted DVD+R and see how that goes.

[Eug]

Originally Posted by Eug 

So, I have confirmed that these HD DVD on DVD-R burned by Roxio Toast work fine in DVD Player.app... with one caveat.

It skips on my iMac, when played from the internal laptop slot-load drive. I guess the drive can't handle the transfer rate, cuz I burned it 26 Mbps MPEG2. However, whenI loaded the disc into an external Firewire desktop DVD drive, it worked fine.

Similarly, it skipped on my Toshiba standalone, presumably also because it couldn't handle the transfer rate for DVD media.

I will try again with H.264, at a much lower bitrate this time.

Well, that's dumb. I can't burn HD DVD at all if I use H.264 encoding. Toast keeps telling me that there's something wrong with the source material, which is of course false. If I burn the exact same stuff to MPEG2, it works fine. There's something seriously wrong with Toast's H.264 support.

BTW, for MPEG2, I tried burning at 18 Mbps, and that's still too high a bitrate on DVD media. My iMac's DVD drive can't keep up for reads so the playback skips. I'm now trying 15 Mbps, but I suspect that still will be too fast. Are these laptop DVD drives only 1X read when the data is on the inner tracks? If so, that means only about 11 Mbps is going to work, and that just doesn't cut it for MPEG2.

They really need to get the H.264 support working properly.

[ghporter]

Eug, is it a size issue with the output file, or something else? MPEG2 supposedly gets a lot of mileage from its lossy compression, and h.264 is supposedly a lot better because it isn't lossy-could Toast just be refusing to burn because your media is too small for the results?