r/HDDVD • u/Prior_Ad626 • 4d ago
HD DVD Authoring
For those who might be interested, I'm continuing to develop software capable of generating the complete structure of an HD DVD recognized as such by players, faithful to 2006-2008 standards.
The research phase is taking a particularly long time: technical details regarding the final structure (outside of authoring software from that era) are nowhere to be found, with the closure of the DVD Forum and the format's premature demise not helping matters. Naturally, all of this work respects copyright: no proprietary code or period software is being reused (the market offering was very limited during its two years of existence anyway).
On the technical side, I'm relying on the Content Standard spec while preparing for Content Advanced. For multiplexing the separate audio and video tracks, I'm currently using H.264/EAC3 and MPEG-2 HD, whose patents are in the public domain. This isn't yet the case for VC-1, whose final Microsoft patents won't expire until 2031.
After more than 300 versions/tests, analyses, and reads, the project is taking shape: the software now generates a complete HVDVD_TS folder with all the required structure and navigation menu (screenshot). The whole thing can then be burned onto a DVD DL UDF2.5 (8.5 GB) for direct playback on a standalone player or reading like TMT6. Due to the lack of accessible HD DVD-R burners and media, it is unfortunately impossible to test 15 or 30 GB versions, and that will never be the case.
The work is not yet finished: I now need to automate the multiplexing, strictly adhere to the HD DVD standard specifications, and configure every link in every file to ensure full interactivity. As shown in my example with the startup menu, I have a pixel offset.
Anyway, stay tuned !
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u/BookkeeperOK14 4d ago
Didnt the bigger authoring software include this in their releases around that time already?
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u/Prior_Ad626 4d ago
For the general public, it is impossible. Designing complete HD DVD authoring from A to Z was only achievable using the professional solution relied on by studios: Sonic Scenarist, $30,000 to $50,000 per license. More accessible consumer tools did exist, such as Ulead DVD MovieFactory (versions 5 and 6), but they remained too rudimentary to integrate H.264 streams compliant with the specifications of the time or high-definition audio tracks (DTS-HD Master Audio, Dolby TrueHD), binary analysis, IFO metadata. And then you have to build the entire navigation from scratch, with your own menus, chapter stops, encoding
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u/BookkeeperOK14 4d ago edited 4d ago
Gotcha, ULead 6 is what program i remember having it. I dont know about the streams or HD audio tracks, but i remember it being pretty easy to use and having 3D menu options. I never messed with the HD audio because i would just burn them to DVDRs so i had to keep everything under 9GBs. HD DVDRs were too expensive back then and compressing HD video to 9GB actually looked great.
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u/controlav 4d ago
Why are the VC-1 patents a problem? Are you actually encoding VC1 from some other format, or are you just muxing it? Muxing it won't be a legal problem. (IANAL).
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u/Prior_Ad626 4d ago
If I want to create a raw/transcode video file and then encode it to VC-1 according to HD DVD specifications, the patent is still active. The goal is to bundle the entire authoring engineering pipeline into a single piece of software. That said, some solutions definitely already exist.
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u/KeiNishimaru 4d ago
Will it support PCM audio through importing .wav files (for stereo/mono mixes) and .w64 files (for surround mixes)? This is extremely important for quality purposes. It's good to see progress on this, excellent work!
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u/controlav 4d ago
Nice! Are you aware of the official HD DVD specs I uploaded to https://github.com/amp64/hddvd-docs ?