Blu-ray image to DVD-R media experience

Sidecar2 wrote on 9/12/2008, 4:40 PM
As most of our shows are under five minutes, the ability to burn a Blu-ray iso image to economical standard DVD-R media that can play in a Blu-ray player is quite attractive.

My experience so far:

Method: Select Tools: Burn Disc: Blu-ray disc

I used the default "Blu-ray 1440x1080-60i 15Mbps" template for a show that had 1080i HDV on the timeline with success. It takes my 2.8 gHz machine about 40 minutes per show minute to render. Ugh.

I used the "Blu-ray 1920x1080-60i, 16Mbps" template with a timeline that has a 4-minute Raylight 1920x1080 29.97 DVCPRO-HD file on it. It was a successful three-hour burn that played back beautifully in a Sony BDP-S300 (with firmware upgraded to 3.70). Though the template says it's encoding at 16 Mbps, the player says it's playing at 10 Mbps, plus or minus a bit. Does this mean the encoder senses that it's burning to a DVD and throttle back the encode rate?

I used the same template with a 720p Raylight file, too.

Then I tried the "Blu-ray 1920x1080-60i 10 Mbps" template, and the player says, "Can't play this format." Strange.

The help file in Vegas says to limit bit rate to 8 or 10 Mbps if burning a Blu-ray ISO file to standard DVD media.

Interestingly, when I use the template that's encoding to 10 Mbps, it won't play in the Blu-ray player while the file that should cause the player to choke works perfectly.

Comments

Sebaz wrote on 9/12/2008, 5:05 PM
Though the template says it's encoding at 16 Mbps, the player says it's playing at 10 Mbps, plus or minus a bit. Does this mean the encoder senses that it's burning to a DVD and throttle back the encode rate?

No, the BDP-S300 has the bad habit of showing a limit of about 11 Mbps when you use DVD5 media, even if it's encoded at a higher bitrate. I got a BD9 from a friend who burned it in Sonic Scenarist (from AVC content), and weird enough, in my BDP-S300 it shows "BD-ROM" on the front display, which is what it shows when I put in a real blu-ray disc. The bitrate bar also shows the correct bitrate. But then he burned me a BD5 also from AVC content, using Sonic Scenarist and the player doesn't show BD-ROM on the display, and the bitrate bar caps at around 11 Mbps. So it's a bug with the player, not the encoding.

Then I tried the "Blu-ray 1920x1080-60i 10 Mbps" template, and the player says, "Can't play this format." Strange.

That's because Sony didn't do much quality control on this release and even though the title of that template shows 60i, if you go into its properties you will see that it's set to PAL 25 fps. So what you ended up with was a PAL BD which obviously won't play on a US BDP-S300.
LJA wrote on 9/13/2008, 10:16 AM
Judging from the quality of the playback on my BDP-S300, my guess is that, under these circumstances, the player is reporting bit rate incorrectly. All my BD files show up having the intended bit rate (18 Mbps) in other software.