Blu-ray Compliance Comes to x264

Apr 27, 2010

The x264 main developer from the VideoLAN open source project has announced that the x264 free H.264 encoder can now also create Blu-ray-quality video.

Jason Garrett-Glaser (a.k.a. Dark Shikari) is particularly proud of the new x264 Blu-ray compliance.

From his blog: "Today we take the first step towards a free software Blu-ray creation toolkit. Thanks to tireless work by Kieran Kunyha, Alex Giladi, Lamont Alston, and the Doom9 crowd, x264 can now produce Blu-ray-compliant video. Extra special thanks to The Criterion Collection for sponsoring the final compliance test to confirm x264's Blu-ray compliance."

The commit in the respective x264 repository includes a sample command for the Blu-ray compliance. The command is "more complicated than usual" because of the restrictions of the Blu-ray specification. Garrett-Glaser adds that Blu-ray disk creation is still missing the new free HD video decoder, the currently available AC3 decoder for audio, and the corresponding graphical software. "The primary missing application," he says, "is a free software Blu-ray authoring tool, to combine the video and audio streams to create a Blu-ray file structure with the menus, chapters, and so forth that we have all come to expect."

Further advice for burning and playing Blu-ray videos are in the California student's blog. To celebrate the day, the x264 project is featuring the two Open Movie Project films "Big Buck Bunny" and "Elephant's Dream" under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported licensing (see the available torrent file).

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