Did you know you can put high-definition Blu-Ray content onto a regular DVD and play it on a Blu-Ray player? People are often surprised to learn this, but what we commonly call ”Blu-Ray” is actually both a physical technology for putting more data on a disk and a high-definition encoding standard (usually MPEG-4 or AVCHD). It’s possible to uncouple the two, and put your hi-def content onto the relatively low-capacity DVD (assuming there is room, of course; the reason Blu-Ray was invented was so you could fit all the data for a 720p or higher resolution movie onto a single disk).
The advantage, of course, is that most everyone has a DVD-ROM writer these days, while few have a Blu-Ray burner. Increasingly, one can find copies of popular HD content online, but if you want a to view it on your HDTV instead of your computer screen, you may need to put it on DVD (unless your home entertainment setup has other options, such as playing HD video formats directly from USB).
Now, normally, the DVD standard is MPEG-2, which does not support high-def resolutions (at least not on DVD), and most commercial burning software will simply downconvert your HD video files if you burn them to DVD (as well as having a nasty tendency to crash without explanation due to codec problems, which can be extremely frustrating to solve, as the dents on my desk can attest). So if you want to keep your content hi-def, you need to do a little magic, in the form of muxing your content and burning Blu-Ray format files onto the DVD manually. This sounds scary, but following the above tutorial is fairly straightforward.
Unfortunately, that may not be enough, depending on your Blu-Ray player (as noted in my comment). As it turns out, some players don’t like the extra folders and will not recognize your DVD. Fortunately, someone has figured out a fix for this as well.
(Disclaimer: for informational purposes only; the author does not advocate the sharing of files. You should be ashamed of yourselves.)
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Lord almighty, I feel my temperature rising!
A lot of players are capable of playing straight mp4 files as well. So if you want a very simple solution for getting HD content played you can encode an mp4 using the h264 High Quality mpeg standard instead. The only problems with this method are that these files tend to be very large and they may have to be split if you are trying to play from a flash drive because the FAT32 standard has a file size limit of 4gb. However if you are burning a DVD-9 with a large file that is roughly 8gb it should work fine in one piece.
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