Blu-ray authoring becoming affordable
Just one and a half years after Blu-ray won the high definition format wars, authoring and reproducing content has finally become affordable. Blank media now costs as little as $2.67 per single layer 25 GB blank, and Blu-ray burners cost as little as $160. While that isn’t dirt cheap like DVD blanks and DVD burners, it has essentially crossed into the mainstream. Blu-ray set-top box players now cost as little as $164 which is affordable and there’s a sufficiently large user base with PlayStation 3 consoles to make Blu-ray home movies or school recitals a reasonable possibility. The price of the burners will likely settle below $100 and blanks will settle below $1 per blank within the next few years, but the prices are good enough to spur mainstream adoption.
On the video production and authoring front, you could use any current video editing suite to encode H.264 video optimized for Blu-ray, or you can even drag and drop an AVCHD video from your SDHC flash card into a standard data BD blank. Ideally, the video source would be from a camera like the Canon 5D Mark II 1080P, but a consumer 1080P AVCHD or 1080i HDV camcorder should work OK when there’s sufficient light. A Canon 500D (Rebel T1i) should provide some decent 1080P output at 20 FPS if you don’t mind an exaggerated low frame rate film look, but you always have the option of using 720P.
Now the question remains whether this is even worth the effort when it’s so easy to just look at a 2 Mbps video on YouTube or give someone an 8 Mbps AVI or MKV file on a flash drive or blank DVD. That’s a tough question to answer because people seem to prefer convenience over quality. But as native 1080P LCDs get more common in homes, I think people will begin to appreciate the higher bit rates afforded by Blu-ray and distributing $2 blanks is still the most economical way of distributing high definition content. A 16 GB SDHC flash card costs $27 which is totally impractical to give away compared to a $2.67 25 GB blank BD disk. Moreover, optical media is a bit more permanent than flash media, and it’s a great way to back up all your home movies and pictures.
That’s all fine and dandy, but currently hard drive tech is cheaper than much of this. I am surprised we don’t start sharing HD movies through TB hard drives. Too bad our Blu Ray or other players don’t have a USB attachment. Although, most of our digital TVs have a DVI port which is always good fun for hooking up the PC.
@nucrash
Good point about hard drive costs. That’s precisely why I do not recommend using Blu-ray for large scale backup. I think for backing up important photos and videos onto an optical disk which doesn’t allow for accidental deletion is very good. The other reason is that there’s no other way to distribute 25 GBs of data for under $3. But for backing up large TB hard drives, it’s not a good solution.
Currently HD is cheaper than BD-R. So I will just buy 1.5T or 2T drive and double back up my videos
I’m well aware of that, and that’s exactly what I do. But that wasn’t the point of this post. The question is what are you going to do when you took a video of a school recital or some event that you want to share with lots of people? Are you going to buy them all hard drives? Are you going to put 2 Mbps 720P content on YouTube or Facebook (I do that a lot admittedly)? For a lot of stuff, probably yes. But what happens if it’s higher quality 1080P content for a really special event? Wouldn’t you want to be able to distribute media for less than $3 a blank? Video professionals could probably offer the BD version for $40 as oppose to the $20 DVD version which for the time being is easier to replicate because you can buy multiple DVD burners cheaply.
George, you are right?
I used to burn DVD videos and send disc to parents. Ever since I bought 5D mark II, I found even if I burn video on BD-R’s most of my folds do not have a BD player yet. I will definitely do that next year, but it is just not time yet. I have a HTPC to play back 1080P video though.
@Roy
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First of all, you lucky SOB with the 5D Mark II
You’re right that BD players aren’t ubiquitous yet, and that may not happen until it reaches the magical $99 mark. We’re at around $130 for a discount BD player right now so it’s getting close. My point was that we’re quickly reaching that point as mass production ramps up and as more people begin to buy the players. Next year is probably the right time to do this.
I’ve been dealing with similar issues. I’ve got a MacPro 8core and a Canon T1i, wireless network at home, a PS3, and *just* got a 1080P Sony Bravia TV. So I have all this power, and yet…I’m encountering some frustrations with getting the optimal viewing experience on the TV. That is, Bluray or HDTV content looks PHENOMENAL, but everything else, well…looks completely underwhelming. Which of course makes me only want to watch 1080p/BD content, but therein lies the rub. It’s harder to find this sort of content and seemingly impossible to *create* this content (my films/animations,etc.) and have it be readily viewable on a 1080p TV.
I just started messing with Vuze and had an iota of success. With their (free) app, you can access media through your computer to your PS3 to watch it on your HDTV. However…since it’s over my wireless network, the HD .mp4 file I was playing was incredibly choppy, thus pointless.
So anyway, my next consideration is this:
http://www.wdtvlive.com/products/wdtv
I probably will get the $99 model (no the new internet-capable $150 one since I’m already aware of the limitations of trying to stream online HD content via a wifi network.) Anyway, just wanted to put that out there. I’m hoping that this is maybe the ideal intermediate solution until DVDs completely go the way of the dodo and we start living in an exclusively BD world.