Hd Quality On Blu-Ray Vs Dvd?

[ruffandbuddie]

Hi.

 

Is there a difference between the quality of HD video content when burned onto Blu-Ray discs than onto regular DVDs? The reason I ask is that the same content dragged to the media window of Toast 10 appears larger when I select BD-R than when I select DVD ... almost twice as large. (5.09 GB vs 3.20 GB) Is there more compression when using DVDs as the media, and if so, is the video quality lower?

[patatrox]

Hi.

 

Is there a difference between the quality of HD video content when burned onto Blu-Ray discs than onto regular DVDs? The reason I ask is that the same content dragged to the media window of Toast 10 appears larger when I select BD-R than when I select DVD ... almost twice as large. (5.09 GB vs 3.20 GB) Is there more compression when using DVDs as the media, and if so, is the video quality lower?

 

Yes and yes.

 

> Is there more compression when using DVDs as the media, and if so, is the video quality lower?

 

Yes, video quality is lower. High Definition DVD, also known as AVCHD has a lower maximum bitrate than BD. Not only would higher bitrate be out of spec, but even if it did play you'd wind up with BD players stuttering or audio and video going out of sync as BD players couldn't read from DVD media fast enough (learned this way back when I was testing BD5 (BD on DVD without AVCHD).

[ruffandbuddie]

Yes and yes.

 

> Is there more compression when using DVDs as the media, and if so, is the video quality lower?

 

Yes, video quality is lower. High Definition DVD, also known as AVCHD has a lower maximum bitrate than BD. Not only would higher bitrate be out of spec, but even if it did play you'd wind up with BD players stuttering or audio and video going out of sync as BD players couldn't read from DVD media fast enough (learned this way back when I was testing BD5 (BD on DVD without AVCHD).

 

______

 

Thanks for your quick response. I suspected that was the case. You might want to inform the pre-sales people, however. I asked this question before purchasing, and was told the video quality is identical for both. It's OK — I'm glad I bought the program. The quality is clearly an improvement over standard DVD burned from iDVD.

[ruffandbuddie]

Yes and yes.

 

> Is there more compression when using DVDs as the media, and if so, is the video quality lower?

 

Yes, video quality is lower. High Definition DVD, also known as AVCHD has a lower maximum bitrate than BD. Not only would higher bitrate be out of spec, but even if it did play you'd wind up with BD players stuttering or audio and video going out of sync as BD players couldn't read from DVD media fast enough (learned this way back when I was testing BD5 (BD on DVD without AVCHD).

[ruffandbuddie]

Thanks for your quick response. I suspected that was the case. You might want to inform the pre-sales people, however. I asked this question before purchasing, and was told the video quality is identical for both. It's OK — I'm glad I bought the program. The quality is clearly an improvement over standard DVD burned from iDVD.

[WayneH]

Thanks for your quick response. I suspected that was the case. You might want to inform the pre-sales people, however. I asked this question before purchasing, and was told the video quality is identical for both. It's OK — I'm glad I bought the program. The quality is clearly an improvement over standard DVD burned from iDVD.

 

Keep an eye on your encoding settings. The bitrate settings can be no more than about 13/16 (average/max) for putting HD onto a DVD. These values work for my Sony BD player. If your player cannot tolerate settings this high, you'll suffer stuttering. The default bitrates in Toast are set MUCH lower, so that may explain why you saw a degraded result. Also be sure to use AVC, as this will give a somewhat better result for a given bitrate. I think the Toast default was MPEG-2.

 

To be fair to Roxio, I think you WILL get the same result for a given setting. It's just that the default settings are different if you're doing a BD versus a DVD.

 

Now a different angle on your topic: I've just compared my bluray-on-DVD project (HD video plus hi-quality photos) to the same content burned to a DVD using iDVD. A friend needed a DVD copy as they have no BD player. I wanted to see just how "bad" it was stepping back down to regular DVD. In iDVD, I was sure to use "professional" encoding to get the best possible result.

 

Well. there is indeed a clear loss of resolution even on my 720 plasma. Score one for Toast. On the other hand, I was VERY pleased to be able to put my entire project onto a single slick looking DVD, instead of three separate not-so-slick disks as I get from Toast. The overall result from iDVD was quite nice and most folks probably wouldn't pick out the resolution difference, but it's clear if you're looking for it.

 

PROBLEM: The iDVD version of my project was better saturated than the Toast version. I had noticed a "fogginess" to the Toast output and doing the comparison to iDVD made it clear. So now I'm wondering if there's something I can do to fix this on future projects.