My non Mac family and friends like to have me make DVDs off their personal videos because iDVD (and iMovie) are so much better than what you get for Windows without paying tons of money. Now it will be even better.

In about a months, it will be exactly FIVE years since Steve Jobs declared "The Year of the HD". Yet, we still cannot author HD optical media.

Windows platform has at least five sub-$100 software packages that can acquire HD video (HDV or AVCHD), edit it, author menus for optical disc and build Blu-ray data. Most of them can even do Blu-ray compatible AVCHD, so user doesn't even need Blu-ray burners (or $6 blank discs), but can instead burn up to 1 hour of full HD video on ordinary DVDs for normal playback on most Blu-ray players. To do that on a Mac, you must get Toast 9 and get your iMovie project into Toast for AVCHD Blu-ray DVDs.

Are we EVER going to see an iLife component that will allow us to burn HD optical discs from our iMovie projects? As much as Steve wants everyone to use iTunes Store and AppleTV for HD media, I'm sure he's aware that vast majority of people will only have a Blu-ray player, and the only practical way for sharing with family/friends/school-church friends is via DVD and Blu-ray.

Didn't previous Macs and the pro software have the capability to burn HD DVDs? Not that it helps, since that was the format that lost the HD wars. But I thought I recall Apple having support for it (not the drives, of course, but the burning support).

But don't blame Apple. Blame those Blu-Ray people. They're the ones with the onerous rules and licensing that would control how and where you can play those Blu-Ray discs, not to be confused at all with the similar but I'm sure completely different rules Apple has embedded into their OS and software for where one can and cannot play HD content from the Apple store.