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Blu-ray currently holds the edge over HD DVD by already having burners available in the marketplace, enabling authors to burn full-length discs for disc checking. What can be tricky, though, is that AACS is required on replicated Blu-ray discs to enable proper playback. AACS is Blu-ray's copy protection scheme and can only be applied at the replicator. "You've got a lot of first-gen players that won't play burned discs [without AACS]," says MX Entertainment's Joe Rice. "In some cases manufacturers will make players available that don't have this restriction. That's fine for an authoring facility, but if you've got a client who's across town or across the world and you want to send them a disc for review, it's difficult because they can't just go and put the disc into any player. The Blu-ray folks have realized this so they're updating the recordable specs. Players introduced in 2007 shouldn't suffer from this limitation." Without HD DVD burners being widely available in the marketplace, authoring houses must turn to alternative methods for testing. "The good news for HD DVD is that Toshiba has provided emulators that are special versions of their A1 player which have a hard disk in them instead of an HD DVD-ROM drive," says Technicolor's Chris Armbrust. "Via the network connection we're able to download disc content to those players and test it to see that the player's doing what it's supposed to do." These emulators have the added advantage of enabling sometimes speedy changes when errors occur. "In the old days even if you were just changing the color of a button, you had to do the compile and download the whole image," Armbrust continues. "With HD DVD, you're just changing some script in the JavaScript file. In less than thirty seconds we're able to make a change, download it to the disc, and start playing it, which is faster than making a recordable disc." Blu-ray Disc's underlying structure offers similar efficiencies, though testing is done with burners already on the market rather than emulators. Because of this, "it takes a lot longer to make a mistake than on HD DVD [when using a Toshiba emulator]," says Armbrust. "These emulators aren't cheap and aren't widely available, but they work great." For authoring houses without a Toshiba HD DVD emulator on hand, they can take advantage of a long-desired feature in optical media. "One of the things we always wanted for DVD was to put content on a CD and play it back on a player, but you just couldn't do that. It worked on a software player and computer but wouldn't work on a CD player," says Armbrust. "The standard practice is to use a DVD-R, which works great on all the [HD DVD] players, but you're limited to the smaller capacity so you've got to cut it down," says Rice. "You can't actually test the full-disc build until you replicate something. Blu-ray is actually ahead of HD DVD in this regard when using players that will play burned discs. BD was designed so that the recordable formats track the ROM format closely, so you can burn a full disc and expect the same performance and experience you will get from the replicated BD-ROM version. On HD DVD, until HD DVD-R recorders are actually shipping, you must burn partial projects on DVD-R for testing or use an emulator," Rice explains. "Instead of putting the entire movie in, you put in a minute of video in all of the choices, then you can burn that disc on a regular DVD and do a complete QC on it as far as how the navigation works, how the graphics look, and the functionality, and then the video itself," says Richard Diercks of the Richard Diercks Company. "Frankly, what we've found is that we can have all the features, then just if it's a ninety-minute movie we can't include all of that." A dual-layer (8.5GB) DVD+/-R disc or replicated DVD-9 can fit about 40 minutes of HD DVD content. "You can release a title on DVD that has HD DVD content on it. The HD DVD player will look at it and will recognize the HD DVD content even though it's on a regular DVD," says Diercks. "For special-interest or shorter programming, it solves a lot of problems in replication. It's cheaper and it works. We have one program that we've developed for a client that is a demo disc of lots of different HD DVD content, and it's going to be released on DVD." Ultimately, though, this method of testing will give way to burning full-length discs as burners become available. "The fact of the matter is that HD DVD burners will be available very shortly. As soon as it's available, we will have one, as that's still the truest test. The question will then become media availability and reliability," says Diercks. Geoff Daily is a frequent contributor to EMedialive and a contributing editor to Streaming Media.
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