Terje, I have already burned 25M/s BD ISOs from DVDA to single layer DVDR using Nero and using Taiyo Yuden media, they play back fine. That being said, I am playing them with a BDROM drive in the HTPC, not from a standalone player.

Probably highly dependent on the player in question. Wouldn't assume that would work for stand alone players.

Yes, I suspect that BDROM players are more forgiving than set-top players -- as was the case with DVD in the early days of DVDR. I will also author BD ISOs to burn to BD once prices of burners and media have dropped.

You're not going to be able to burn much at 25M/s since the spec doesn't allow this. 15 or so is what you should aim for for DVDs. It is not really a DVDA issue, it is going to be hard for a Blu-Ray player to get 25M/s of data off a DVD.

I can tell you that in my BD player, Sony BDP-S300, the highest bitrate I can play smoothly is 20 Mbps. When I tried to burn HDV files at their original bitrate of 25 Mbps they only played fine for a few seconds. Having DVDA 5 encode to 1920 AVC at 20 Mbps produces good results picture quality wise, although it's very time consuming.

I'm just finishing a project that I'm going to have to burn to DL Blu-ray and was wondering what bitrate I should use.

The default in Architect is 18 Mbps, and I was going to increase this to around 25, but I'm a little confused as to why people are saying that this sort of bitrate could cause problems when played on a standalone player. I thought that the Blu-ray standard allowed for bitrates up to 40Mbps and so all players should support this rate. If so, why should a rate of 25 cause issues? Or have I got the wrong end of the stick?

I want to get this right first time, otherwise I'm going to end up with a very expensive coaster!

I've just ordered a couple of re-writable single layer discs, so I guess I can wait until they arrive and then do some test projects.

*** Edit ***
I've just re-read this thread and realised that the original poster is talking about dual layer DVDs and not dual layer Blu-ray disks. Can I, therefore, safely assume that 25Mbps on a Dual Layer Blu-ray disk will be fine?

Thanks

25 Mb/s on any Blu-ray disk should be fine. On DVD it shouldn't be since most players won't be able to read that much data off the DVD at the rate they spin it at.