Burners for Blu-ray | Recorders by Pioneer LiteOn and LG

Industry reports in Taiwan suggest that the Blu-ray BD-ROM format will ascend into the mainstream during 2008. Digitimes says BD-ROM will be helped along by even more manufacturers jumping on board with the new Blu-ray rom drives.

Some reports even go so far as to suggest that the BD-ROM could be the most popular drive sold during 2008. Note that’s BD-ROM, not BD-R or BD-RW – so this relates to readers only.

The BD drive prices are falling every month, largely down to the fact that the laser power which is required is a lot less in a reader than a writer.

My quick guide to blank bluray and disk recording.

Now that you have finished your HD film editing - what is the best thing to do next? Regular Dvdr disks are merely going to give you standard definition production, you could degrade your high def footage to SD quality and subsequently go make ordinary Dvd discs. If you are going to do that it will have been a waste of time recording it in high def in the beginning.

Therefore what should you do? The answer must be to use a hd disc like blu-ray blank. Now that the format war has finished it is blank recordable blu-ray that has come to the forefront as the storage devices of choice for high def.

The bluray recording devices are bit by bit working their way into our every day lives and onto mainstream Computers. Blu-ray burners and recordable blank blu-ray media is technically far superior and much larger volume than standard DVDR. Single layer bluray discs can hold twenty five giga byte with dual layer discs providing fifty gig. There are promises of bluray of 200GB to arrive soon!

Blu-ray was designed to play High definition film and to give advanced features such as alternative endings, directors commentaries, image in picture etc - something that is not possible with regular DVD that are based on the MPEG2 video format. The film on blu-ray disks can be in either MPEG2, H264 (more advanced MPEG) or VC1 (a reworking of Windows Media). Get a bluray motion picture off the shelf and chances are it will be in VC1 or H264. The H264 codecs advantage is that you can fit more on a solitary disk. hd MPEG2 on single layer BD-R disc can give approximately 2 hours of footage, use H264 and you can look forward to up to 3 hours at the same quality. H264 will take in the region of 3 times as long to encode though before you go ahead and burn a disc on your blu-ray recorder!

You definately are going to need a very high spec PC with a blu-ray burner before you start encoding High definition though. blu-ray burners are at the moment sensibly priced and are falling quite rapidly, at the moment you can buy one for below £100 from UK web retailers. Single layer (25GB) writeable media and blank blu-ray discs now as low as £1.30 each so we will soon see the sub £1 recordable bluray. When we reach a stage where the media retail prices fall this will spur the crooks to become interested in copying bluray contents and in turn this will grow the uk market quickly.

The Sony PlayStation 3 although not a blu-ray burner is the most fashionable way to get to view a blu-ray film as it has a blu-ray rom built in. Reasonable stand alone players will set you back between £100 and £150 - the cheapest solution is of course to buy a blu-ray rom for your PC - now below £40!

My favourite authoring application is Sonic DVDit Pro High definition, other common options include Adobe Encore and Sony DVD Architect. All will help you make a bluray disk with all the extended features you would fancy including menus, adding subtitles, numbering scenes etc.. It is also workable to author simple blu-ray disks with programs like Nero and Power DVD and they are a hell of alot less expensive than the high end software earlier mentioned, but the limitiations are apparent and will only generate basic play-back disks.

Then comes the question that matters - will my bluray high definition content now play on anyones blu-ray player? Regrettably there isn't a clear answer just yet and its a bit of a suck it and see approach. Hollywood has complete paranoia about piracy, they don't want the DVD occurrence all over again! This means they are making it as tricky as possible to copy proper blu-ray movies discs on to blank bluray. Now that you are filming in high definition you ought to actually try the new encoding and media - even for the fact that it will give you the maximum quality backup of your recording available for transfer onto yet to come media devices - who knows what we will be using in 10 years time, might it still be the blank blu-ray we are starting to take up now? If you have any thoughts on blu-ray recorders, burners or blu-ray roms send us an email.