Freeware HD-DVD Authoring?

[Bathrone]

Wishful thinking at this stage?

What I want to do is basically take my star trek enterprise DVD9s, and using the episodes only, transcode those into either AVC or VC-1, and then build a nice episode menu nav to go with it. Burn it onto HD-DVD and playback in my 360 with the hd-dvd add on.

[Zeul]

Not at this time - or ever?
Any transcoding/re-encoding is going to reduce the quality of the original - adding more bitrate will not improve the picture quality from the original. You would be better to use the original assets and then build your own menus and burn to DL DVD.
If you wanting to take advantage of the new HD-DVD 256 color subtitle layers then that is different of course.

[Bathrone]

Specifically I want to take the poor compression used in mpeg2 to AVC / VC-1 with the least quality loss while substnatially reducing the size of each episode

[Zeul]

I see. You want the minimum number of discs possible. ie One disc may contain 10 episodes.

[sjchmura]

VC-1 and AVC look VERY good at 720p and 3.5mbit. This is about 1GB/hour. You can fit ALOT on a DVD9.

Ulead and Pinnacle will author HD-DVD XBOX360 compliant disks - but will RE-ENCODE to MPEG2 :(

Sucks

So if they would NOT re-encode we would be fine. The VC-1 streams made by WME (free) are fine but need to be authored correctly :(

[auenf]

you could always just encode to 576p/480p (Bob())

iirc, DVD Studio Pro only supports h.264 in 576p/480p and 720p currently.

Enf...

[Bathrone]

Any developments?