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Make your own Hi-Def DVDs

DVD SP

A few weeks ago on Episode 12 of the Podcast we mentioned that Apple's DVD Player was ready for a special HD format and not the same as HD DVD or Blu-ray which was correct, but then we went on to say that the discs would not play in Toshiba's HD DVD players. Jeff Halperin from Zen Video wrote in to let us know how wrong we were. Then he proceeded to rub it in by sending us a few HD discs he created to try out in thd HD Beat labs, don't worry we enjoyed it.

Both clips were like watching Discovery HD Theater and were short, but great. The picture quality was fabulous in both our HD DVD player and on our Macs using the latest version of Apple's DVD Player. He created the discs with Apple's DVD Studio Pro 4, which is a program that comes bundled with Final Cut Pro. A single layer DVD can hold about 30 a minute video encoded with MPEG2 (sorry no H.264) and should work with Dual Layer discs. The bad news is HD DVD's cool interactive layer is not supported. We find this quite interesting considering Apple is in the Blu-ray camp, but these discs play in Toshiba's player. I supposed they don't mind just so long as they are on the cutting edge.

Thanks Jeff!