With the new technology becoming more present in stores (especially blu-ray ;-)). There are obviously a number of people that will hold back on purchasing HD equipment until it is more mainstream. Which brings me to a thought... Lately I have seen some samples of HD video (sourced from blu-ray and HD-DVD) recoded to 720p files with the likes of DivX, AVC, VC1 codecs being used to give a full feature length movie in 720p a file size of about 8.5gb (good for a DVD9). I have even seen one that had a final file size of 4.35gb (just right for a DVD5) using DivX 6 and DTS audio. Now I will say these videos look superb, not as good as blu-ray/HD-DVD 1080p but way better than (SD) DVD! My thought is many people have stand alone DVD players capable of playing SD DivX files. If we had a source 1080p video file and recoded it to SD DivX cranking up the bitrate to fill up an entire DVD5 and kept the original audio (ac3/DTS), how would that rate against a regular DVD using the older mpeg2 video codec? Now I am aware that the movie studios have access to master copies in which they encode the (mpeg2) DVD's from but I have seen some pretty bad quality DVD's released. I know, I know... it's a waste of HD video throwing away all those poor pixels... But I am just exploring possibilities for people that haven't made that jump into HD yet. It's not even for me as I have a PS3... Anyway... What are your thoughts?
I have the Samsung 52" 120hz 1080p with Harmon/Kardon DVD48 1080p upconverting DVD player, I too want to put High quality DivX onto DVD5 or DVD9. SVCD2DVD 2.5 and HDTV2DVD from the same company I heard do a good job for putting high quality DivX onto DVD, can anyone confirm?
I still believe and I know many others also agree that the old VirtualDub is one of the best tools to create DivX avi files. I use AviSynth to filter and VirtualDub to encode and the results are always perfect.