Options for displaying HD content from camcorder on HDTV

Factual Questions
1

I have a new HD camcorder. I seem to have the following options to see the video played back as HD on my HDTV: burn a Blu-Ray disc and play it back in my Blu-Ray player (I don’t have a Blu-Ray burner), or connect the camera directly to the TV (I don’t have a mini-HDMI cable to do that, just analog cables).

Is there any way to encode HD video onto a standard DVD so that the Blu-Ray player will play it back in HD? After all, it is possible to encode video onto a CD and play that back in many DVD players, so there is a precedent for such cross-breeding.

Any other options I’m completely overlooking?

Frankly, I would be surprised if this is possible, but then again I get surprised all the time.

2

Buy a mini HDMI cable. Anything else would just be over working a simple problem. Sure you could rip it and convert it and burn it but by then it probably wont be highdef anymore, DVDs and CDs do not have the storage capibility

3

Toast can do this on a Mac: Toast 20 High-Def/Blu-ray Disc Plug-in although of course you only get a small amount of HD time on the DVD (about an hour,I think). I assume they’ve got a comparable product for Windows, but I wasn’t able to find it in a couple minutes of browsing.

4

Concur in toto.

5

This would work for the short term, and I’ve already ordered one. But the storage medium for the camera is SD cards (class 4 and up, 16GB holds about 1:30 on highest quality), and I am not going to amass a library of SD cards at about $40 a pop, and would prefer not to transfer files back and forth to the computer every time I want to do a playback. I have FiOS and with Verizon Media Manager you can play video directly from the computer to the TV, but it doesn’t recognize the HD file formats.

6

I have a spare PC that I have connected to my TV, which I can play the videos from my camcorder through. This may not be an option for you, though.

You COULD find a Blu Ray player that does DivX playback, but that would require transcoding all of your videos, which would be a tedious process.

7

What a mess. That’s why I have a home theater PC. No need to have 20 different devices to play back unique formats.

If you have a laptop or a netbook with a VGA or DVI output you can hook that up to your TV and play the files that way.

8

An XBox360 or PlayStation3 can likely play the content. Can’t guarantee it, depends on what format the video is in. But my PS3 does a great job of playing the .MOV video files from my Sanyo HD camera.

9

Nevermind.

10

Since it doesn’t sound like the other solutions are working for you, I dug a bit more. Here’s the Windows version of the product above:

It can (supposedly, I don’t own it) burn small amounts of HD to a standard DVD in such a way that a Blu-Ray player can play it back. This feature is apparently available only in the “pro” version on Windows ($20 more) and via an extra $20 plugin on the Mac (link above).

11

You gave me an idea. I already have Sony Vegas Movie Studio. I scoured the help files and found that it can also can burn HD content to DVDs which can be played back on (some) Blu-Ray players.

I had an answer under my nose the whole time. :smack: