Yes.... I'm equipped with a blu-ray burner, 25gb of bd-re media, and lots of time. So.... what the heck do I do??

I have the Panasonic Blu-Ray SW-5582 which came with a Panasonic Blu-ray/DVD-RAM driver for Windows. I guess with this drive you can use the blu-ray functions like a floppy drive, just drag and drop for file burning.

I'm formatting the 25 bd-re right now, instructions say it'll take up to 90 minutes, which seems about right. Apparently you can't burn to the disc until it's formatted. It needs to be UDF 2.5 for compliance with the Blu-ray disc association (but if you're not planning on doing movies, it can be FAT32). bd-r is UDF 2.6.

Once it's done formatting... I kinda want to try to get high def video on it. I have the FusionHDTV USB2.0 recorder and want to be able to store/playback the video on the blu-ray drive... not as data, but as video.

Any advice?

Any tests I should do for the community?

Lemme know.

Does this drive comply to the ACSS limitations??

Surely it cannot manage 2-layered BD media, but can it handle also BD-R media?

Ummm... this can handle everything! 20GB BD-R/RE 50GB BD-R/RE DVD-RAM/±R/±RW/±DL CD-R/RW. BAM!

It does comply with ACSS limitations says the instructions.

Seems these once lively forums are now slowly dying. Oh well. I'll let any wondering eyes passing through see what I've done:

Downloaded Ulead MovieFactory 5 (before the blu-ray support was pulled) and captured HDTV with my fusionHDTV usb2.0 capture device in 1080i mpg. Used ulead to make a nice menu, very cool interactive menus too, and now am burning to the blu-ray disc.

It should be done any mintue now, and hopefully what I'll have is one of the first, home made HDTV blu-ray movie discs.

Maybe we're just silenced with envy. That and this particular forum is pretty quiet anyway, I'm sure that there are alot less eyes seeing your post than if it had been posted in one of the higher traffic forums.

I'd certainly like to have a Blu Ray or HD DVD burner, but I'd probably just use it for data burns at the moment if I had one, nothing too exciting about discussing data burns. Limited content and limited standalone abilities at the moment, but I'm sure things will get alot more interesting in the next few months. It will be very interesting to find out what sort of quality of burns you are getting, but I don't know if there's yet any real worthwhile way of testing the burns, other than a simple check of the integrity of the data.

Well you are just the person that can help me

I know my DVD authoring from A to Z - I am curious to know how BluRay works ? Is it much the same as a regular DVD is authored ? Does it use VIDEO_TS folders and VOB files ? Does it have support for the MPEG-2 DVD, AC3, LPCM, etc.......

Thanks.

The problem is the support from the drive side and media side, also software is advertised to be BD compatible but suffers to work if you try them..........

All what you wrote sounds interesting.

What did you pay for that little beast?
What for the media, and what media have you (used)?

LOL

The company I work for is testing blu-ray stuff and got it as a pre-production drive from slidirect.com link to blu-ray page with phone number

Ok, here was my experience with burning a blu-ray HDTV home made movie disc:

Ulead MovieFactory 5 is generally the same as any other movie factory, but with the prerelease blu-ray support you can fill a 25GB movie disc. I think they pulled the module from the final release so they can up it to 50GB burning.

I had captured HD mpg's with FusionHDTV usb2.0 and Ulead took them no sweat. It didn't even have to transcode them; they were already in HD playback format.

The menu system was interesting. They only had one layout, a HD TV slightly to the right of the menu, showing a preview of what title you have selected. Very cool because you can have more titles per page because there is just text, when you hover over the text the TV shows a preview of that HD program.

That's pretty much the only thing different than burning a regular DVD.

The rendering of the menus during output took FOREVER!! I'm sure this was not optimized. For, 5 video clips, two menu pages, and only a 5 second preview of each menu item plus transitions (the menus have beautiful transitions into the movie, or from page to page) the rendering of this took 4 hours. 4HOURS!!!!

Anyway, the disc when it's done is full of files and folders. To be exact it has a total of 10 folders and 300 files. I'm sure there would have been more had I actually had enough HD content to fill the disc. The main folder on the disc is BDMV then inside that is a folder called STREAM which has all the movie content broken up into tons of .m2ts files (?).

I'm still looking for playback software.

I've noticed everyone lies constantly about this. Nero has had press releases saying playback software is said to be in "Nero 6.6 with Showtime2" <-BS!! I have had Nero 6.6, Nero 7, Nero 7.0.8.2 and the latest Showtime2 and no where does the software/website/support ever say blu-ray playback and it doesn't work either.

I'm looking for ANYTHING now to play this thing.

Woohoo, thanks for that great insight info!!

m2ts - sounds like mpeg2 title streams. Like TS you can get when you record a whole TV cahnnel with more than 1 audiostream, subs etc.

Call me when the discs are R/W,last more then 5 burns, 50 gig, and under $2
Till then hell can freeze over twice

well... we're almost there now. These discs are BD-RE (which is RW) I believe the rewrites are in the tens of thousands, the discs are both 25 and 50 GB right now.

So if you want that for under $2, you'll be a very late arriver, because even double layer DVD discs are barely $2 now, and those are only 8.5GB. I feel bad you have standards that will take so long to accomplish.

Well I can bump up the price some but the other rules still hold. They have not even got DVD SL under control yet let alone DL. Lots of plastic got thrown away with that. I think it's cool beans you get to play with a BR but the price is going to keep me away i feel for a long time.

Here's another small piece of information. My Nero showtime2 will not play this Blu-ray movie disc, but when I browsed to the STREAM folder and opened the .m2ts file, they played. So I got a little incite as to why there are so many files... it ends up that EVERY little transition, and every combination of what you could possibly do is a video file. All the transitions from menu to menu, or menu to video are all non java, they're just rendered. every option you could do in example "click play (rendered) click home (rendered) highlight movie 2 (rendered) highlight movie 3 (rendered)" on every single menu for every single option everything was rendered as .m2ts files. That explains why the JAR folder (I thought was for java code) was empty.

If you had a full 25GB with 10 pages of menus this would have taken days to render! I wonder if Ulead is trying to do all these effects in java before they release it in its final form.

50GB rewritables for under US$2? That's 1TB for less than US$40 which will make Blu-ray more attractive than HDDs. That will KILL HDDs.

Kenshin: Always will be hard drives or very big flash. Something has to hold the programs and the temp files. Are we talking about a standalone or an actual BR (fit in pc) burner. Im so confussed. People are just going to love all this new complexity.

Another problem is nobody knows yet if the data on a BR will last over a week. No scans, not enough time to see, not enough people. Could be vapor ware out of the box. Nothing takes this long

Did you really think I would recommend future computer users to use an opticl drive to boot OS?

The HDDs I meant above are the HDDs used for storage of multimedia files, and etc. rather than installed OS and programs. If rewritable optical drives and media could get very large, very fast, and very cheap, it means the end of HDDs not because optical storage alone can replace HDDs but because there are RAM, ROM, and flash that can do what HDDs do to boot OS, launch programs, and store temp files. RAM, ROM, and flash have all become extremely larger, faster, and cheaper than 10 years and 20 years ago.

When did you first read serious news and previews of Blu-ray and HD DVD? 5 years ago? 10 years ago? Not even most casual CDFreaks visitors knew what Blu-ray was about 5 years ago. Only a very tiny percentage of DVD burning enthusiasts were interested even in 2003. Compare that with IEEE 1394 and SATA. And there are DVD, CD, MD, LD, DAT, etc. that all took far longer from inception to mass production.

Whether you can trust Blu-ray's rewritability is entirely another matter. CDFreaks has plenty of visitors that try to find the cheapest sources of DVD recordable media even when it's made in China and by some manufacturers difficult to identify even for experts and reporters. If you just bought HP DVD writers and HP DVD media, you would never have a problem in burning and reading. Unless you were especially unlucky or simply dumb or lazy. (HP DVD writers were first made by Ricoh and HP DVD media were first made by Ritek under Ricoh license and supervision.) First products found in retail markets of Blu-ray and similar technologies were all made by such industry leaders as Mitsubishi, TDK, Sharp, JVC, Sony, Matsushita, Pioneer, Hitachi, etc. Have you ever read Blu-ray media failing? It's already been like FOUR years and I haven't seen anyone and I'm sure there have been enough manufacturers and enough experts that have been testing and testing them.

Now, compare that with CPU industry. Or RAM. Only a few manufacturers design and produce microprocessors now we regularly use. And over half of them are actually made only by Intel. Samsung makes about one third of the world's memory products of DRAM, SRAM, flash, and other types. So it's very unlikely to find a low-quality (that just fails in a matter of minutes) CPU or RAM in even a US$200 PC. About 90% of the world's CD and DVD write-once media (that's CD-R, DVD-R, and DVD+R) are produced in Taiwan and China. Two largest manufacturers are Ritek and CMC and we all know how much they know about making optical disks. Such things have little to do with what Blu-ray is.

I don't think that the data storing reliability with BR is worse than with current DVD formats. BR burners are in usage since a while...

I agree with both your thoughts Kenshin and Chef. Still to soon to know if the format will last. It's still a baby in the ODD world

WEll I have just seen the price of TDK BR. For 25Gb -R its £11.50/$19.99 (US) and -RW is £14.50/$24.99. WHich is only twice the price that I can get hold of DL discs, love to know where electro is shopping or what brand he is using for under $2. A 5pack of Verb DL -/+ in one of the shops I go to is £30, works out £6 a disc. Depending on how things go I will be keeping a closer eye on BR now.

Verbatim 2.4x DVD+R DL discs (MKM001, made in Singapore) are available at some major retail chains here in Germany, a 10 disc cakebox for 19.95 EUR, that's less than 2 EUR a disc.

Well they aren't available here, at that price, in the shops I have been too and I live in a major city. 25Gb RW for £14.50 still isn't bad. I wonder how much it will drop by as time goes on?

.... havent you had to buy a new monitor

$25 dollars a disc isn't bad It's more then bad. I hope you don't scratch it.

Given what I said about the avaiability of DL-/+R where I live, remember I can't shop online, 5 x 8.4= 42Gb. For £1 less than a pack of 5 Verb DLs I would get 50Gb RW. The actual value would be based on how well they performed. Therefore on a price comparison they aren't that bad.

Ofcourse this doesn't take into account the cost of the drive, and being me I would wait until I either realy needed to change or there was a significant price reduction.