High Definition

[JTRp2e]

How can I create a show 1920 x 1080 pixels and record it onto a DVD, to produce a show on a 1080p HD TV, via a DVD player?

Do I need a Blue Ray recorder? If so, can you get them for a PC and does Pictures-to-Exe 6 support them?

[Lin Evans]

Hi,

You don't actually need a BluRay burner to create a 1080p HD show, but you do need a BluRay player or an hdmi cable and hdmi output on the computer to play it back on a television.

To create the file with PTE, you set your original images to the desired resolution (1920x1080) and create the slideshow. Then you use the "Create" HD Video for PC and Mac to output an MP4 h.264 file.

From this point, you have several options. If you want to place this file on a standard DVD media blank (4.7 gigabyte) then you need some specialized software which formats a standard DVD media blank to a BluRay compatible format and burns your MP4 file to the disc. There are several software packages such as Pinnacle Studio 12 (and probably Pinnacle 14), Nero, etc., which can do this. PTE doesn't burn a BluRay directly. Once burned to media, you then need a compatible player which will play the BluRay compatible disc. Most of the newer BluRay players will do this. You can't, however, play the BluRay formatted disc on a standard DVD player which is designed for PAL or NTSC format even though it may have been used to create the high definition DVD.

You could also use one of the Western Digital devices which are available to play the 1080p mp4 h.264 or if you have a computer (preferably a notebook) with an HDMI output you can play the executable directly without going through the process of creating a video (mp3 h.264). The very best quality will be the executable played directly via the HDMI cable and output using the TV as the computer monitor.

PTE's Video Builder does not support burning BluRay directly at this time. Perhaps in the future. Buying a BluRay recorder for a PC is possible, but quite expensive and not really necessary, nor in my opinion the best way to go.

Best regards,

Lin

How can I create a show 1920 x 1080 pixels and record it onto a DVD, to produce a show on a 1080p HD TV, via a DVD player?

Do I need a Blue Ray recorder? If so, can you get them for a PC and does Pictures-to-Exe 6 support them?

[mhwarner]

You could also use one of the Western Digital devices which are available to play the 1080p mp4 h.264 or if you have a computer (preferably a notebook) with an HDMI output you can play the executable directly without going through the process of creating a video (mp3 h.264). The very best quality will be the executable played directly via the HDMI cable and output using the TV as the computer monitor.

Assuming you have a "PC input" connector on your TV, you can do it with a regular video cable (typically called a 15-Pin HD D-Sub Cable (HD15) ) that looks like this:

I hooked my laptop to my TV (I just used the cable that goes between my PC and my 24" Samsung SyncMaster 245BW monitor) and had 1920 x 1080 resolution. It looked just as good as my monitor (only bigger). Beats the heck out of having to deal with the time and trouble of burning disks. Although I purchased a WD TV appliance about a year ago to use with my old TV, I also have discovered that I can connect a USB drive (my WD Passport for instance) directly to the TV and do "straight" photo slideshows and listen to MP3 music from it as well.

The TV is Samsung Series 5 540 (which Costco has had on sale recently for about $700 if you're in the US).

[mandarinfish]

Just wanted to add to this thread that I regularly create AVCHD disks using PTE and Nero. Similar to what Lin described, but I skip a transcoding step. From PTE, I create an AVI file (using PTE video codec and PCM audio) in the 1080p resolution. Then I use Nero to directly import this AVI file and create an AVCHD disk (with menus) and burn using a standard DVD disk in my DVD writer.

I've tried the route of creating an HD MP4 file, but most of the software I've tried is not smart enough to avoid transcoding the video again (uncompress/recompress instead of passing through the video stream) which degrades the quality. So when I have Nero take in the AVI rather than the MP4, I avoid the initial compression. Maybe Pinnacle is better at passing through the video and just remuxing it, but I haven't tried that one.

And they looked beautiful on my HD TVs! Note that just as Lin says, while you don't need a blu-ray writer to do this, you do need a blu-ray/AVCHD player (and not all blu-ray players can play AVCHD). I have a Playstation 3 that I use and I've taken my slideshow disks to friends' homes where they played on Samsung players. (yes, I bore my friends with my vacation slideshows!)

Linda