Break out a blank DVD and fire up x264! The folks behind x264, the freeware h.264 encoder, have announced Blu-ray compatibility. That means you’ll be able to burn a DVD containing h.264 video that will play on your standard-issue Blu-ray player. That’s good news if you still burn DVDs, something I haven’t done in for something like a year, and even then it was for someone else. Go away, plastic discs.
My own biases aside, this is a pretty big deal. Although there’s no freeware Blu-ray authoring software available right now (meaning you can’t create discs with fancy menus and the like), you’re still able to output a disc that will play on your Blu-ray player.
Depending on compression, the resulting file can fit on a standard 4.7GB DVD. Of course, you could give the file little room to breath by sticking it on a dual layer DVD.
The sample ISO, which contains scenes from several Creative Commons films, comes in at 2.33GB. If only I had any blank discs to speak of, I’d be able to try it myself!
All you’d need is any old ISO burning software, like Nero or whatever, and off you go.
Who knows, in a few years time we’ll be able to create full Blu-ray discs of our exciting family reunions!
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