Let's talk about burning BluRay discs.

John_Cline wrote on 9/28/2007, 1:12 AM

This is a pretty devisive topic here on the forum lately, but let's talk about burning BluRay discs.

I am fully aware of burning HD-DVD discs on red laser DVD media, however, I need to burn HD discs of at least two to four hours in length. Obviously, HD-DVD is out for now.

Has anyone here had success burning "standard" BluRay discs? By that I mean, discs burned on BluRay media with menus which are playable on "standard" BluRay players. If so, I guess we can break this down into four areas: a) What burner are you using? b) What software are you using? c) What blank media are you using? d) On which specific BluRay players have you been able to play these discs?

I guess I should add that I have Adobe Encore CS3 and I've authored up BluRay projects and rendered the disc image to the hard drive and it plays perfectly in PowerDVD. I'm just wondering whether to take the next step and buy a burner* or wait a little while.

John

* (Probably the Plextor PXB900A or the Panasonic SW-5582-C, both of which burn 50 gig discs. 50gig because I'm also looking at BluRay for data storage once the price of discs comes down a bit more.)

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Comments

MozartMan wrote on 9/30/2007, 8:02 PM

Consumer level BDMV authoring with menus, etc, for a $100! Great news!

Thanks Laurence.

blink3times wrote on 9/30/2007, 8:46 PM

Laurence:

I'm trying to test out Pinnacle's BDMV burning. I don't have a player so I'm creating the BDMV folder to the HDD and trying to play the M2TS file through Nero Ultra (I have the Nero HD DVD/BD plugin)

But the video comes out playing pretty jerky and I have a feeling that it's Nero. Is there another Player that works on computer??

John_Cline wrote on 9/30/2007, 8:55 PM

H.264 AVCHD requires considerably more CPU horsepower to decode than MPEG2. I've generated a BluRay project in Encore CS in both MPEG2 and H.264 formats. They both play fine using Cyberlink Power DVD on my Quad-core machine with an nVidia 8600GTS video card. However, the 8600GTS has hardware accelerated MPEG2, H.264 and VC-1 decoding, so the CPU has very little to do with it. When playing the same project on one of my other computers, the MPEG2 version plays well, but the H.264 is quite jerky. This machine has an nVidia 6800XT card which has hardware MPEG2 decoding, but not H.264 nor VC-1. What speed is your processor and what video card are you using?

John

blink3times wrote on 9/30/2007, 9:05 PM

I'm running a ATI 1950pro 256Mb... I think that MAY be the problem. The CPU should be good.... Q6600 overclocked to 3Ghz.

Actually... I shouldn't say it's exactly jerky... it's more like trying to watch a streaming video on a dial up line... runs for a few seconds than stops (sort of like it's filling up the buffers again) and then runs again for a few seconds....

John_Cline wrote on 9/30/2007, 9:13 PM

Yeah, your CPU should be more than enough. Your ATI 1950 has accelerated MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264 decoding, so that might not be the problem either. In the Nero player, if you enable the on-screen information, does it report that playback is being hardware accelerated? In the Nero Showtime Player under "Options" > "Video" is "Hardware Acceleration" enabled?

blink3times wrote on 9/30/2007, 9:20 PM

No it doesn't say anything about Hardware Acc. But I know I have on in the configuration files.

Maybe I will try a slightly lower bitrate... my test file is set at 18M

blink3times wrote on 9/30/2007, 9:35 PM

Actually, If I re import the the M2TS file, it plays fine in the Pinnacle preview window so the problem has to be Nero.

I know that my HD DVD disks work fine in the Tosh player, but the Nero HD DVD/BD plugin is a little buggy even with the HD DVD disks.

Nero on screen display is showing the frame rate starting out at something like 15 and it slowly drops to about 5... but then as I said... it's working well if re imported back into Pinnacle

This is good! We now have not only a HD DVD option, but a BD option as well! The next question though is what BD players can reliably play this stuff back?

4eyes wrote on 10/1/2007, 6:41 AM

But the video comes out playing pretty jerky and I have a feeling that it's Nero. Is there another Player that works on computer??18000kbs avc is a very high bit-rate for consumer recorded HDV. I suggest starting at 6000kbs - 8000kbs and work up in 2000kbs increments to a point where the video looks very good to you. Depends on the encoder being used.
I encoded some hdv.m2t (hd-mpeg2) files in the ulead software to H264. The settings in their encoder were VBR 15MBS Max, the video came out with avg_vbr of approx 10MBS. The video produced was very impressive at average 10MBS/Max 15. Hard to tell the difference compared to the original source.
The ulead encodes were impressive.

I've been getting purple-ish blotches in some of the Vegas H264 encodes.

blink3times wrote on 10/1/2007, 7:11 AM

"18000kbs avc is a very high bit-rate for consumer recorded HDV'

Well, I'll try a lower bitrate for nero... but Pinnacle preview is not struggling at all at 18000 (actually it's 17000).... even in full screen mode it runs smoothly. So that suggests that it is not the machine or the bitrate... but rather Nero Showtime.

4eyes wrote on 10/1/2007, 8:32 AM

Sometimes I've had similar problems with Nero Showtime while WMP11 or PowerDVD7 played fine.

Sorry, I was trying to point out that your encoding settings are pretty high for AVC/H264 video if your source videos are from a HC3 or HV20.
I think that AVC@18MBS is approx same quality as HD-Mpeg2@40MBS or higher.
You could drop the bit-rate to 10Mbs or 12Mbs and get excellent results. This will double the amount of space to put on the dvd.
Of course different encoders will have different results.
Even taking the original HD videos and encoding them at SD 720x480/576@3-4mbs looks great.
For General distribution I've been using AVC 1280x720@4Mbs or 6Mbs. the average computers are capable of playing these files back.

Laurence wrote on 10/1/2007, 9:12 AM

Anyway, back to the original post, in the past the only real Blu-ray authoring option was Roxio DVDit Pro HD. Now you can also use Ulead Movie Factory Plus with the extra HD Power Pack plugin. On short discs you can use regular DVD-Rs but on longer projects you can use either single or dual layer BD-Rs.

Anyway, probably your best bet is to use Ulead Movie Factory plus with the HD Power Pack plugin with BD-R media on this project because in this case you need the long playback time. In the future you can use the same program with either BD-R or DVD+-R media depending upon how much playback time you need.

4eyes wrote on 10/2/2007, 9:24 PM

blink3times,
I've just come to the conclusion that Nero Showtime does not use the ATI AVIVO hardware accelleration. When I had a NVidia 8600GTS Nero must have been using the hw accel on the Nvidia 8600GTS card. Played very nice. Nero also displayed (under information) the words "Hardware Accellerated". Using PowerDVD 7 or WMP cpu useage with the Nvidia 8600GTS was 1%.

When using an ATI X1550 or ATI HD2600XT cards in the same computer Nero isn't accessing the ATI hardware accelleration. PowerDvd does, WMP also does.
So for the X1950 you would have to use PowerDvd7 ultra OR try to play them in WMP. If WMP doesn't want to pickup the extension just rename the avchd video to mpg. In WMP you can also manually load the file & tell WMP to try & play it. WMP should access the AVIVO accelleration on the video card and use it to play AVC video.

BTW- Using an ATI HD2600XT pci-e card cpu useage is max 1% (Q6600, no OC) using PowerDvd7 or WMP. Nero runs < 35%

John_Cline wrote on 10/5/2007, 5:50 PM

Here's an update to my quest to burn a standards-compliant BluRay project to BluRay media:

I bought a Panasonic SW-5582 BluRay burner from ZipZoomFly.com for $522 delivered to my door. I chose the 5582 because it is the same drive as the Plextor 900a and the Sony BW100. Plextor and Sony have just rebadged the 5582, the drive is made by Panasonic. Also, most companies that make multi-drive duplicator towers use the 5582.

I ordered some Verbatim BD-R and BD-RE media from tapeandmedia.com. The 95357 BD-R media was $10.69/disc and the 95358 BD-RE media was $14.97/disc.

I generated the 1 hour 23 minute BD project in Encore CS3, complete with menus, and made two versions, one using MPEG2 and the other using H.264 (MP4). I burned each version to a disc and and they both played flawlessly in a PS3, a Sony BDP-300 and a Samsung BD-P1000.

Bottom line: It worked, first time, exactly as it should. Generating a BluRay project in Encore is no different than a DVD project. The discs have played in the three BD players I have tried so far. I'm happy.

John

blink3times wrote on 10/5/2007, 7:51 PM

"Bottom line: It worked, first time, exactly as it should. Generating a BluRay project in Encore is no different than a DVD project. The discs have played in the three BD players I have tried so far. I'm happy."
========================

Mmmm, maybe it's time for me to try it again!

One question John... Was the BP300 a newer one or older. In other words I guess what I'm asking is the firmware... was it the up-to-date firmware?

The last time I tried BD burning, the BP300 failed miserably and I know they said something about fixing it with a FW update.

Laurence wrote on 10/5/2007, 10:16 PM

Can Encore do AVCHD discs on regular DVD-Rs? Most of my projects are short enough to fit on a regular DVD-R and I hate to spend the extra money when I don't have to.

megabit wrote on 10/6/2007, 12:44 AM

Guys, sorry for shameless crossposting with another thread of mine, but since nobody answered that, I'll ask again here as this is really crucial to the VP8 Blu-Ray encoding:

When burning Blu-Ray disc from timeline in VP8, I have noticed a very important thing: the color space is hard-coded into NTSC in all Blu-ray templates, including the 50i ones. I have found this out comparing the colors of renders using "Render as" and playing with the "video format" in the "Advanced Video" tab. Only with this parameter set to PAL or Component, do the final renders maintain the juicy colours of my original (PAL) m2t clips! When set to NTSC, the colours I'm getting are dull - and this is what I'm also getting using the Blu-ray 50i template.

Please tell me whether or not I'm missing anything here. If not, I guess it should be put on a wishlist for the nearest update that the Blu-Ray templates be editable, just like those in "Render as" option. Should this - for some reason - no be possible, Sony must at least change the 50i template to output in PAL colour space!

Really, the impact of this setting on the rendered file colours is much greater than that of using 8bit vs 32bit with 2.22 gamma! just take a look at the grabs I posted here:

HDV PAL vs NTSC colours comparison

John_Cline wrote on 10/6/2007, 4:25 AM

Blink,

The BDP300 is relatively new, but I did update the firmware to the latest version, which is 2.60. I believe that BD-MV wasn't supported in the 300 until firmware 1.55 or higher.

John

blink3times wrote on 10/6/2007, 5:02 AM

Thanks John!