You can now burn Blu-ray movies onto DVDs

Apr 28, 2010 09:22 GMT  ·  By

Blu-ray, as the winner of short HD video format wars, is starting to become increasingly popular. Blu-ray players are cheaper than ever and widely available and there is plenty of content available, Hollywood blockbusters, TV shows and more. But for the ‘average Joe’ video maker, Blu-ray is still a pipe dream. Professional Blu-ray encoders can be prohibitively expensive, so they’re not a real option for putting one’s summer-vacation video on Blu-ray.

Things are about to change, though, as the team behind x264, the free software video encoder for the H.264 standard, has announced that it is now possible to create Blu-ray-compliant video streams with x264. This first step will enable regular users and amateur film makers to create HD video files, which will work with all hardware Blu-ray players.

For many years it has been possible to make your own DVDs with free software tools. Over the course of the past decade, DVD creation evolved from the exclusive domain of the media publishing companies to something basically anyone could do on their home computer,” Jason Garrett-Glaser, the lead developer of the x264 project, wrote on his blog.

Today we take the first step towards a free software Blu-ray creation toolkit.Thanks to tireless work by Kieran Kunyha, Alex Giladi, Lamont Alston, and the Doom9 crowd, x264 can now produce Blu-ray-compliant video,” he announced.

It gets even better, with x264, one can create a Blu-ray format disc using regular DVDs. This saves users a significant sum, as Blu-ray burners and discs are still quite expensive. With a “reasonable level of quality,” they can fit a Blu-ray movie onto a DVD9 or even a DVD5 disk. The team says that most Blu-ray players should see these disks as regular Blu-ray discs, with a few exceptions, like the Playstation 3.

One piece of the puzzle is still missing, there are no free software Blu-ray creation tools. As such, making a Blu-ray disc complete with menus, chapters, and so on still requires commercial tools. But now that a free software Blu-ray encoder is available, things should be moving forward at a faster pace.

x264 is available for download here on Softpedia.