Re: dvdauthor in the future (HD question)

Somebody asked me:

> I wounder if there are plans to make dvdauthor handle HD content to
> DVD and BR-D in the future?

I thought the answer to this question is so important, I would publish
it to the list.

First of all, DVDAuthor and a bunch of other related programs owe
their existence to a group of people who spent a lot of effort
painstakingly reverse-engineering the DVD-Video format based on little
or no publicly-available documentation. As far as I’m aware, Scott
Smith, the original creator of DVDAuthor, had no prior code examples
to follow, he was writing code to build these DVD-Video structures
entirely from scratch. When something didn’t work right, he had to
take apart existing discs to see how they did things, and follow their
example.

This is not the kind of thing I would personally have the patience
for. Give me specifications, and I can write code to interface to
those specifications. I also like to write explanations of things;
finding no good single place to start to understand how a DVD-Video
disc is put together, I wrote my own <http://wlug.org.nz/DVDVideo>.

Anyway, the point is, now that DVD-Video is a (mostly) well-understood
format, I can happily write code to implement the relevant
functionality, as well as write documentation to help others
understand it.

But now, Blu-Ray is being touted as the successor to DVD-Video,
offering higher-definition images and all kinds of other benefits. How
much progress has been made on reverse-engineering the format? I don’t
know. Have others been following this?  Do we have enough public info
yet to begin to write open-source authoring tools?

In any case, I’m pretty certain the architecture of Blu-Ray video is
completely different from DVD-Video—I’d be very surprised to discover
that they have much in common beyond the basic MPEG stuff. For a
start, I believe Blu-Ray uses a Java-based virtual machine for
programming its interactivity, instead of the low-level machine
language specified by DVD-Video.

From which it follows that authoring Blu-Ray video discs will require
the creation of entirely new software. Therefore, it is probably
pointless to augment any of the current parts of the DVDAuthor suite
to include Blu-Ray support.

That’s my current feeling, anyway.

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