DVDAfterEdit, and now BluStreak

Those of you who have been following our news releases have probably noticed that BluStreak Navigator is still not released for beta testing on the web site, in contrast to our stated timeframes. Since these estimates have been overly optimistic, we are going to stop giving target dates, and instead only announce software when it is actually available for testing.

Some of these delays have been because of large improvements to our code base that we believe will save development time in the long run, and produce very robust applications. This integration also means that we are able to share the same code across multiple applications.

We have been using BluStreak AfterEdit as our main development platform. It can currently open and display the complete structure of any Blu-ray BDMV folder, down to the elementary stream and even transport packet level. This is probably more useful to our competitors than to BD authors, so we are keeping this program closely held within a very small internal beta group. Eventually it can become the Blu-ray equivalent of DVDAfterEdit, but we need simple authoring solutions much more urgently.

AfterEdit can import a BDMV folder, save it as a project, export a new BDMV folder, export a spec-compliant BDMV disc image , and export a BDCMF folder for replication. We are working closely with EclipseData to finish debugging of the BDCMF output. Once this is complete we will release a beta version with limited display of the BD structure, probably to be named BluStreak BDCMF.

AfterEdit can also import AVCHD folder structures as produced by AVCHD cameras, and output them as BDMV to any of the export modes listed above.

Navigator can import multiple BDMV and AVCHD folders, and select individual clips for eventual inclusion in a generated BDMV, with the same export options listed above. The menu design portion has been delayed while we built a robust graphic editing environment. We are doing a simplistic template-driven version of menu design first (with popups), to be released as soon as we believe it can be used for useful work.

We have working with a third-party solution for encoding, previewing, and multiplexing.

We have been evaluating Adobe Premiere/Encore CS4 for possible creation of prosumer-level BD's for replication. There have been widespread complaints of bugs in Encore CS3, and we are anxious to hear of your experiences with CS4, and if they have solved enough of the earlier problems to make it worthwhile.

Please share your opinions here, and email me (Larry) at the web site address if you think you can contribute to our development effort. We are always looking for test data.

Regards,

Larry