For those of you who bought a library of HD DVDs before Toshiba jumped ship, Wired has a nice write-up detailing what is involved in converting an HD DVD to Blu-ray format.

Below is an HD DVD ROM and some Blu-ray burners and media to get you started.

$249.99 - LG Super Multi Blu-ray Disc Burner & HD DVD-ROM Drive Black SATA Model GGW-H20L - Retail — 5 hours ago

 

$8.99 - RiDATA 25GB 2X BD-R(Blu-ray) Single Disc - OEM — 5 hours ago

 

$179.99 - RiDATA 25GB 2X BD-R(Blu-ray) Inkjet Printable 25 Packs Disc - Retail — 5 hours ago

 

$279.99 - Aleratec 25GB 4X BD-R(Blu-ray) 10 Packs Disc - Retail — 5 hours ago

 

$10.99 - Verbatim 25GB 4X BD-R(Blu-ray) Single Disc - Retail — 5 hours ago

 

$249.99 - Verbatim 25GB 2X BD-R(Blu-ray) White Surface with Hard Coat 25 Packs Disc - OEM — 5 hours ago

 

$13.99 - RiDATA 25GB 2X BD-RE(Blu-ray) Single Disc - OEM — 5 hours ago

 

$15.99 - LG 25GB 2X BD-RE(Blu-ray) Single Disc - Retail — 5 hours ago

 

$15.99 - SONY 25GB 2X BD-RE(Blu-ray) Single Rewritable Disc w/ Hang Tab - Retail — 5 hours ago

 

$14.99 - TDK 25GB 2X BD-RE(Blu-ray) Single Disc - Retail — 5 hours ago

 

$15.99 - Verbatim 25GB 2X BD-RE(Blu-ray) Single Branded Disc - OEM — 5 hours ago

 

If you want to watch a PAL movie in an NTSC DVD player, you are out of luck. There are DVD players out there that will play both PAL and NTSC discs, and, in fact, I have one of those. The problem with that solution is that see flickering lines and some jagged lines when watching PAL discs. This could just be a flaw of my cheap DVD player.

Anyway, on to the point of this article. Read the rest of this entry »

I know there are solutions out there for video transcoding such as the awesome ffmpegX, but I wanted to make my own solution. I drop my source video onto this droplet, and with just a few button clicks, I can convert almost any video to an mpeg2 that is DVD compliant. What I did here was make an AppleScript droplet which is an application bundle and contains the binaries, ffmpeg, pulldown, and mplex. Pulldown and mplex are necessary if you are starting with a 23.98fps source and want to keep it at that rate.

Read the rest of this entry »