I have been making a documentary in HDTV format for initially bluray distribution. It is encoded in H264 25fps PAL with macroblocs & is approximately 16 Gigabytes in size & 5 hours in length.
I get queries from people who would like it but have no bluray but do have an Xbox 360. Research shows that if you get your video project onto the Xbox 360's hard drive then that machine can play it. So then that sets the challenge. The Xbox 360 market penetration is actually greater than that of bluray, the latter has been pushed into the market mostly by way of the PS3.
Unfortunately the Xbox 360 is by design a very closed system. Microsoft gave the machine the ability to play HDTV movies from the hard drive because it wants people to download on a rental model via Microsoft Live, something that has been overlooked in the format war between HD-DVD & bluray. The easy way is to get Microsoft to put your content onto the MS Live system but that leaves you a little guy at the mercy of Microsoft which is never a good thing.
I would like to think you just put your movie file onto a few DVDs where the DVDs are formatted as PC data drives, then put them into the Xbox 360's DVD & copy from there to the hard drive, but something tells me it will not be that simple & in any case that would still only give you the bare video file, in chunks.
It occurs to me that you might be able to do a variation on a theme, namely create a Xbox 360 game DVD, this allows the DVD to contain a managerial program for the other content, you have had fixed movie clips in games, so-called cutscenes, often these are in high definition, & often you can get the machine to copy from the DVD to the hard drive, & often of course games contain err menus. Alas I know of no game that can have its content spread over 2 DVDs. But if such a DVD can be authored then it can also be replicated in a factory.
I use a quadcore PC with Vista Ultimate 64-bit, this has the basic documentary video file, the problem now is to put it onto distribution media, I have focused on bluray distribution but now want to look at distribution to Xbox 360. Once you have a suitable image you send it to a factory for mass replication.
