by Ken Berry on Thu May 24, 2012 8:59 pm
Just to be clear, VS can indeed burn the equivalent of a Blu-Ray disc on a standard DVD. BUT -- and there's nearly always a "but", isn't there? -- as lata has said, it has to be done in AVCHD format (which of course is one of the Blu-Ray formats), andthe resulting disc can only be played in a Blu-Ray player rated to play such discs. Not all of them can, but if they can, they will have an 'AVCHD' sticker somewhere on the box. That sort of disc is called either an AVCHD or hybrid disc.
And of course you are limited to the space of the disc, which is aroun d a maximum of 4.3 GB as opposed to a normal single layer Blu-Ray which can take 25 GB or dual layer 50 GB. VS burns such discs using a maximum bitrate of 18 Mbps which ensures high quality -- though is no longer as high as the highest allowable bitrate for AVCHD under international standards which is currently 27or 28 Mbps. But it is nevertheless very good. And using that bitrate will allow you to burn a 20 - 22 minute AVCHD to a DVD in AVCHD format. You can burn more by dropping the bitrate, but of course doing so also reduces the quality on the disc.
VS also allows you to create a menu on such a disc. Not all software packages from other brands can necessarily do so.
And a final factoid: when the AVCHD is burned to the DVD a file structure is created which closely resembles -- though not totally -- a Blu-Ray disc. A main folder labelled BDMV is created, with a number of sub-folders. The actual video is in a sub-folder called STREAM, and the files will be number sequentially upwards from 00000.mts. This compares to a standard def DVD where two folders are created: Audio_TS (usually empty) and Video_TS which contains the video/audio streams.
Ken Berry