Unless you have had your head in the sand you know that HD-DVD is dead, BluRay won.
Yes this news is dated, but I have been busy!
So what does that mean for you? Go re-buy all of your HD-DVDs as BluRays? Show the movie studios that they profit from their format war by waiting until physical media dies and downloads prevail?
Well in my case I am trying to save my investment and transfer those HD-DVDs to a format that is playable on my computers and migrate to BluRay (fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice...)
To that end, I have gone through a series of experiments trying to find a format that will work on my PC.
The goals are to not loose any picture quality, to loose as little audio quality as possible, one audio track is fine, I am willing to give up on sub-titles and I do not care about file size.
Based on the above this means I have to find a container format (MP4, AVI, TS, M2TS, ASF or WMV), I tried most of these and I have come to the conclusion, that when it comes to my machine that will be a AVI container.
Most HD-DVDs contain VC-1 Elemental Stream and Dolby Digital Plus stream, you will end up having to transcode the DD+ into AC3, in theory the impact of this should be negligible.
What I describe bellow will not work on protected HD-DVDs but it does look like it will work fine on un-protected ones.
- Demux the HD-DVD into its elementary streams using EVODMUX.
- Convert the VC-1 elementary stream from the HD-DVD 29.97 fps streams with pulldown flags to 23.976 fps progressive using vc1conv.
- Transcode the DD+ audio stream to regular AC3 using eac3to
- Wrap the VC-1 elementary stream in a AVI using vc12avi, this outputs, in my case, multiple 2GB or less AVIs.
- Merge the resulting AVIs into a single AVI with virtualdub and ffdshow.
> Set Codecs/WVC1 in ffdshow VFW (not directshow) decoder to 'libavcodec' in the VFW decoder configuration.
> Select Video, Direct Stream Copy
> Open the .00 and then use "Append AVI Segment" add second segment, rest are added automatically.
> Select "Save as AVI"...
> You may have to set XP SP2 compatibility mode to get it to play, you will know if when you execute the GUI and nothing happens.
> Drag and drop, as the UI indicated, did not work, you may have to right click on the open files list, select Add, repeat for each file (AVI and AC3).
> Once the two files are added Click on button to generate from details.
> Now, click on Start.
> Select the desired output file.
As I said the resulting file plays without the need for an additional codec on my Windows 7 installation; on prior releases of Windows I additional codecs would likely be needed.