Compiling new BluRay Disc from old

Tim Stannard wrote on 9/4/2018, 2:49 PM

It's that time of year when i have to compile a selection of films from members of our video club onto one BluRay. These are sent into me in several different formats from different members. Anything on DVD I bring into Vegas and upscale it (and indeed covert 4:3 - yes, some people still use that aspect ratio - to 16:9). My problem has been with films received on BluRay. I typically copy the nnnnnn,m2ts file onto my hard drive and drag it into DVDA. Note: the original file plays fine on a domestic BD player, in VLC and other media players on my PC and I can import it into and render successfully within Vegas. It also plays OK within DVDA.

The problem comes with preparing the BluRay.

DVDA goes through all the Generating GUI for each file and then successfully renders several files until it comes to the first of the files which I'd copied froma BluRay disc. After a minute or two it will fail "An error occurred while preparing the compilation" "Status: mscorlib.dll::ThreadHelper::ThreadStart_Context::This program has a bug. - m_ptsOfNextGOP is empty." (I've researched this error and come across nothing useful other than DVDA is buggy)

Why is DVDA even looking at the content? These are files from a BluRay compliant disc, surely it should just stick them back on the new disc!

Obviously I'd like to solve this, but I'd even be happy with a workaround. I can re-render the problem files in Vegas but, this seems to take some time and so although I set the render options the same as the settings for the source m2ts file (per MediaInfo), Vegas takes a while to render, suggesting that it is actually decompressing and recompressing, presumably dropping some quality along the way.

Is there a way to extract the audio and video as .ac3 and .avc files (the source files are avc) so I can use those within DVDA?

Similar problems with DVDA Pro 6.0 build 237, DVDA build 67 and DVDA build 84.

Comments

Former user wrote on 9/4/2018, 10:59 PM

You might try TS MUXER to demux the files.

https://www.videohelp.com/software/tsMuxeR

Tim Stannard wrote on 9/5/2018, 2:29 AM

Thanks for the suggestion, David. Unfortunately no joy. TS Dmuxer split an original m2ts file into a .ac3 and a .264 file. i Imported these into a new DVDA project (which recognised the .264 extension to my surprise. This would play ok in the DVDA window. When I selected Make BluRay I has the same issue - it took a while "rendering" the GUI (a minute or so - longer than I might expect for a clip which shouldn't need re-rendering) and failed with the same error "An error occurred while preparing the compilation" "Status: mscorlib.dll::ThreadHelper::ThreadStart_Context::This program has a bug. - m_ptsOfNextGOP is empty."

I've since narrowed the problem down to files on BluRays created by one person - a Mac user. m2ts files created on PCs in Encore and Edius are not causing an issue.

 

Former user wrote on 9/5/2018, 7:36 AM

I would guess that you would need to re-render this file then.

Tim Stannard wrote on 10/24/2018, 4:14 PM

A bit of a belated update as I'd forgotten about this thread. It won't help anyone to know I never really got to the bottom of this. Re-rendering the Mac user's mt2s as something elase (cant remember precicely what) didn't solve it. In the end it took two complete re-installations of Windows and all software, plus adding the files one at a time and saving between each before I finally got a working bluray.

Ho hum....

 

EricLNZ wrote on 10/24/2018, 11:04 PM

Interesting. Personally when using SD on a Blu-ray I let the SD VOB files go on the disk. They are compatible with the Blu-ray specs. They take up less room than being converted by DVDA. They become m2ts files on the disc but are the original SD files which the Blu-ray player upscales. Players generally appear do a better job of upscaling than software. As for converting 4:3 to 16:9, they will appear pillarboxed. Converting 4:3 to 16:9 by either stretching or cropping is to me an insult to the original producer. If a movie was made in 4:3 it should be shown as such, not cropped or stretched.

Tim Stannard wrote on 10/25/2018, 2:53 AM

@Eric_NZ I agree hardware players generally upscale better, however I've had issues putting 4:3 SD files on a BluRay in that *some* systems stretch these and this seems unpredicatable. Therefore I render as 16:9, pillarboxed so that I can guarantee how they will be displayed.

EricLNZ wrote on 10/25/2018, 4:35 AM

In my experience there's two causes for that Tim:

The 4:3 file incorrectly declares its PAR or interlacing. The Blu-ray player deals with the file on what it's incorrectly told. You can correct this in DVDA

The users Blu-ray player is set up to display "Full 16:9" (or something similar) instead of "16:9". This then stretches out all 4:3 to 16:9. Sadly the only way around this is to do what you're doing.