Sony Announce UMD Composer For UMD Video Creation

Sony Computer Entertainnment Japan have announced some new UMD video authoring software called UMD composer. It allows developers to create UMD discs images and will set you back a cool 215,000 yen, or less dauntingly approximately $2000 USD!

At the demonstration, Sony played a H.264 video with a resolution of 720 x 480 that was created with Stream Composer. Sony also stated that most UMD-Video titles currently on the market are recorded in H.264/MPEG-4 AVC with a resolution of 720 x 480.

Naturally, I'm going to incur the wrath of the H.264 proponents here, but I had previously demuxed some UMD H.264 titles verified they are encoded at 720x480. But I have to say, at the 720x480 resolution, H.264-type artifacts (which roughly amount to an edge-aware smoothing filter) are evident. I'm sure the folks at Doom9.org would simply say that Sony's H.264 encoder is lackluster.

Source: Maxconsole.net: Sony Announce UMD Composer For UMD Video Creation