HD For Indies

OK, file this as unconfirmed gossip, I only have one source on this so far, but it boils down to this:

-I had mentioned the possibility the other day that it was proposed to go into the spec, but now it looks like it IS going into the spec

-as I'd hoped, it would appear now that the official Blu Ray spec will support, meaning all Blu Ray players should be able to play, a "properly" formatted DVD-R with MPEG-2 HD content on it. As in a red laser disc, be it DVD-5 or DVD-9, with HD content on it, would play in a Blu Ray player

-you'd have to use Blu Ray style authoring tools - your traditional DVD authoring software would not suffice, because Blu Ray discs are a different file/data/disk format than regular DVDs

-H.264 may be having trouble with interlaced content, so MPEG-2 may have to be used. Apple folks also told me of similar H.264 difficulties at NAB this year, I thought it was just because some Apple engineers were being laggards in their implementation, but it might be an issue with the core H.264 spec itself. Which I don't understand, since I'd think they'd have two independent fields to be processed as two separate progressive images, and could just process them to display as fields...blah blah blah but the intraframe (or interframe? Late/tired, whichever is frame to frame) compression is probably the hold up there.

-In any case, using a tool like an updated DVD Studio Pro, you'd author your HD content and burn it on a DVD-R, and it would play in ANY Blu Ray player that properly and fully supported the Blu Ray spec

-this is hot, since that may well mean that pretty much raw HDV footage could be piped over onto a Blu Ray disc, although Sony specifically said that wouldn't work or wasn't planned to work as of MWSF almost a year ago (back in Jan '05). HDV is long GOP MPEG-2 with a GOP of 15, which sounds to my mind similar to what Blu Ray would need for HD content. Maybe Blu Ray is full raster 1920x1080 instead of HDV's 1440x1080, I dunno. But something software could fix during an encode, certainly.

-this'd be HUGE for the home market - FINALLY a way to watch your own high def content on your own HDTV without having to plug the camera into the HDTV (so 1980s a solution!). The ability to author to a convenient, nonlinear access shiny disc is a world of difference from mastering to tape.

-I don't know/don't recall/don't remember reading that HD DVD would offer a similar capability