If you are talking 24Mbps h264 AVCHD on DVD, no. If you are talking 24Mbps h264 on BD, yes. The spec as far as I know does not support 24Mbps on DVD, actually the upper limit for red-laser is ~25Mbps but virtually nothing will play or burn it with reliability. Blu is the way to go.

Jeff

Thanks for your reply, Jeff.

The AVCHD spec for the format is at:

http://www.avchd-info.org/format/index.html

In this reference and elsewhere, the spec identifies an 8 centimeter DVD which can be provided in AVCHD camcorders to record AVCHD content rather than use an SD card. For this specific case using mini-DVDs inside the camera recording, the limitation you refer to does indeed exist. The AVCHD spec is 24 Mbits/sec, and does not specify BD in any way as far as I can tell.

As you say, PD9 does only appear to offer the 24 Mbit/sec option when burning BD disks, but surprisingly offers 1920 by 1080p AVCHD disks, which are NOT part of the AVCHD spec. I presume they do this to support the camcorders such as the Panasonic TM700 and TM900 which provide an unusual, nonstandard progressive 1080p mode.

DVD players and DVD optics and drives can run at speeds way above 24 Mbits/sec, and those of us who copy and rip DVDs are well aware of 16X, 20X, and even 24X burners which handle red laser DVDs at well beyond 100 Mbits/sec.

The Cyberlink re=rendering and downsampling are unfortunate and time consuming and degrade quality. And although I have a BD burner, I just don't see the logic of using expensive disks for the typical half-hour or 40 minute home video which will fit nicely on a red laser disk at much loss cost and with no re-rendering waiting time.

Larry

Maybe I missed something along the way, the spec you quote essentially mimics what I said. At the bottom it states, "(~18Mbps for DVD)". I do believe that is the limit when creating a authored AVCHD menu type DVD. PD, depending on graphics card, CPU and/or GPU encoding and the behind the scene SVRT has a video bitrate of ~15.5Mbps for AVCHD authored DVD's. You can put a raw h264 24Mbps "Produced" file on DVD and some systems will play it. Of my 5 BD players, 2 handle it just fine.

The re-render is always an issue, I don't disagree there.

Maybe a media player would suite your needs?

Jeff

I interpreted the spec differently, since it makes no sense to me to create a consumer spec which allows 24 Mbit/sec video encoding without a distribution method other than BD burning, particularly if the media and players for red laser disks can inherently support much faster bitrates already.

Judging by the lack of support for this 24 Mbit/s rate in PD9 as well as other AVCHD authoring software, I must agree with your conclusion.

I have numerous media players (Seagate, Western Digital, PC and Mac-based, Apple TV, Sage TV) and routinely play the 24 Mbit and higher content from them, including stuff from my Canon and Sony DSLRs which can run into the 45 Mbit/sec rates, and I personally do quite a bit of BD authoring using Vegas 9 and Final Cut / DVD Studio Pro and other professional tools. I've used TSMuxer, multiAVCHD and other tools to edit the MOVIEOBJ.BDM and other files to essentially 'fake out' the player to handle red laser versions of BD content as if they were AVCHD, and I have seen a number of my players and other peoples players handle the higher data rates without any issues. And indeed many players, even my temperamental Sony Playstation 3 will play raw .m2ts MPEG2 transport stream files with 24 Mbit/sec AVCHD content without sweat.

Thanks for your reply, which I accept as correct, with my regret that PD9 does not allow this form of 'non-standard' red laser disk as it does for the 1080p much less standard format!

Larry

Interesting topic this!

At Dafydd's request, I actually created a 24mbps AVCHD DVD by burning a 24mbps project to blu-ray folders, then burning the exact same project to AVCHD DVD folders, replaced the 'Stream' folder on the AVCHD DVD with that of the blu-ray, before burning to DVD using imgburn.

The resulting disc in both my PS3 and Sony blu-ray player would only play footage for the first couple of seconds before freezing.

As already discussed, the bitrate limit for DVD is 18mbps for h.264 with 24mbps for blu-ray. As a Canon user who shoots in 24mbps, all my footage is on blu-ray to utilise SVRT and preserve quality.

Cheers,

Andrew Alienware Aurora ALX R4 - Intel i7-4820 4.2 GHz - 32GB DDR3 RAM - Crucial 512GB SSD - 1TB Seagate HDD - 3TB WD Green HDD - 4TB WD Green HDD - MSI NVIDIA GTX 1070 8GB

Sony HDR-PJ810 and HDR-PJ530

Interesting indeed!!!

I thank you Andrew for your reply. I offer the possibility that the method suggested by Daffydd is really not complete, and offer, as evidence, a very simple shareware program which makes perfectly playable 24 Mbit/sec AVCHDs on red laser disks which play perfectly fine on all of my (3) BluRay players, all of my computer players (PowerDVD, ArcSoft Total Media Theater) and (most of the time) my Playstation 3.

As I stated originally, the hardware is vastly most capable of 24 Mbit/sec speeds on a red laser disk. Indeed, I authored over a thousand HD DVDs with 25 Mbit/sec MPEG2 streams on red laser which played flawlessly in players starting over 5 years ago......

I suggest you download and use this program:

http://www.sharewareconnection.com/bdmovie-maker.htm

You merely specify the input file, a .m2ts (or, for that matter a re-named Canon .mts) copied directly from the Canon STREAM folder or re-authored /"produced" using PD9, in the MXP, 24 Mbit/sec format.

Create an ISO file and burn it with IMGBURN.

You should found that it plays flawlessly on your BD player if it like my Sony or Panasonic.

Daffydd's method (I believe) overlooks the improper buffer specification and lack of cache sync which arises when a STREAM folder encoded at one bit rate is merely substituted for another, without correction to the supporting information files, in particular BDMOVIE.OBJ.

There have been several techniques floating around literally for 18 months or so now to do what I am describing, and those of us who got into 24 Mbit/sec AVC (and above) but refused to fill at 25GB expensive blank with 2 or 3 GB of video clips of home movies have worked around this using several shareware and hex editing techniques.

I will concede that Jeff's interpretation of the AVCHD spec may perhaps limit "official" DVD burning to 18 Mbits/sec, but this is no means whatsoever a technical limitation but rather a 'political / marketing' limitation, which can be overcome as I describe.

Regrettably, the ability to do nice menus, subtitles, etc. is not as easily accomplished until Cyberlink or somebody else decides to change the few critical bytes needed in the .OBJ files to make the 24 Mbit/sec disks play properly....... That is ALL THAT IS NEEDED!

Larry

Very interesting! I recently recorded a practical exam for a friend of mine in 1920x1080 24mbps. It turned out to only be 30mins long so, rather than use blu-ray, I re-encoded the project down to a lower bitrate and burnt an AVCHD DVD. It still looked good and only filling 25% of a blu-ray seemed wasteful just to maintain quality.

I estimate you'd get about 40 minutes of 24mbps footage on a dual layer 8.5gb AVCHD DVD so in this situation being able to do that would've been perfect.

Thanks for the excellent post, learnt a bit there!

Cheers,

Andrew Alienware Aurora ALX R4 - Intel i7-4820 4.2 GHz - 32GB DDR3 RAM - Crucial 512GB SSD - 1TB Seagate HDD - 3TB WD Green HDD - 4TB WD Green HDD - MSI NVIDIA GTX 1070 8GB

Sony HDR-PJ810 and HDR-PJ530

Quote: I will concede that Jeff's interpretation of the AVCHD spec may perhaps limit "official" DVD burning to 18 Mbits/sec, but this is no means whatsoever a technical limitation but rather a 'political / marketing' limitation, which can be overcome as I describe.

My understanding over the years is that it really was a technical limitation, I say technical because it is the lowest common bitrate that would play on ALL players. Hence a standard, that's not to imply that some players can't handle more or that the technolgy is at the limit. I think we see that in the current spotted success, certain brand of players for me are much more tolerant than others, it's not old vs new either.

I think a similar scenario has happened in the plain Jane MPEG DVD world. Very few programs write DVD's at the limit spec. In fact, many players often shutter or video freeze with audio continuing if you push the bitrate too high. PD surely throttles their bitrate back, I’d assume to create the most “playable” DVD. In fact, they lowered the acceptable SVRT bitrate threshold between PD8 and PD9, a real shock to me.

I totaly agree that the corrections are rather trivial, however, my guess would be is that PD does not want to create discs that might not work in some systems so they seek the lowest standard.

Jeff

That's why I have DL burners. When I need just that "little extra"......
__________________________________________
Windows 8 Pro 64 bit

CyberLink PowerDirector 10 Tutorials
PDtoots PowerDirector Tutorials

**NOTICE**
When you are asked to provide a DXDIAG you go the following link and do part "B". Your posted specs are NOT what we are looking for as they tell us nothing. The specs on the box of your computer mean nothing. The DXDIAG shows us how your computer is configured as it runs.

DXDIAG Link

Started reading this thread,
and after a couple of posts I was saying to myself:
Stay with it!!Stay with it to the end!! Hold on here!

Interesting topic this!

Interesting indeed!!!

Very interesting!

Impressed by the knowledge,
and I understand clearly why I didn't become an engineer.


Just something.
https://www.petitpoisvideo.com

and I understand clearly why I didn't become an engineer.

Hi Nina!

I am indeed a retired electrical engineer! I put my first TV station on the air in the early 1960's, so I have had many years of dealing with Sony and all the other past and present players in video and electronics!

Best,

Larry

Jeff,

I don't think we can ever know the reasoning for the choice of a system rate spec'd at 24 Mbits/sec but then limited to 18 for DVD, but my technical insight says it is not at all a technical issue and my political / business instinct is that it is everything to do with market segmentation.

Sony introduced the BD format over 10 years ago, and I actually played with their earliest BD players in Tokyo at that time. They have squeezed every last drop of market potential out of this invention, looking to generate and protect their revenue for both content (since they own Columbia / CBS / studio properties) and for their delivery system. Those who have followed HDCP and the progression of content scrambling and encryption and their licensing will understand what I am referring to.

I personally have no doubt that some players cannot / are not running firmware to support 24 Mbit/sec red laser playback, although the only such players I have encountered personally are their Playstation 3, which will handle it effortlessly with some firmware and not at all with other firmware, and a few odd Samsung players, again, based upon the rev of the firmware. In some instances, the player stopped handling the high rate disks after a new firmware rev was flashed into the player, disabling the 24 Mbit/sec feature.

Cyberlink may have sincerely believed that they did us all a great service only supporting the lowest common denominator, if this is indeed their thinking and motive. But I would argue that it would far better serve their user community to handle this in exactly the same way as they eventually chose with progressive 1920 by 1080p for the Panny TM700 and TM900 crowd, namely to provide a "non standard" template which the user can chose to ignore or use. Compatibility should be at the user's discretion in this way, at least if I had a voice, as opposed to the least capable players.

It is also entirely possible that PD9 can be hacked via either the registry or in one of its DLLs or ini or other files to replace a useless template (such as a 720p template they currently provide) to allow it to get to the highest 24 Mbit/sec rate. There are enough of us mad scientists, retired engineers, and other dreamers that such mods are not out of the realm entirely. It would be so very nice if Cyberlink recognized that numerous 24 Mbit/sec camcorders are out there, that a year and a half has elapsed since the first (Canon HF11) was introduced, and that the newest Canon Vixia HD Pro line including the model I am presently using are ALL capable of MXP 24 Mbit/sec rates.

Larry