I recently rendered two Blu-ray files for a client delivery. Although I began with the MPEG2 Blu-ray template, I modified the bitrate encoding settings (max, avg, min) to assure it would fit well on the physical disc (standard procedure, ya?). When I got into DVDA it complained it was a not compatible with the media format and insisted in re-encoding. Note that I tested using Vegas 14 and Vegas 17, and DVDA version 100 and the prior build version as well.

Short on time, I decided to re-encode myself in Vegas -- better control, and I feel Vegas renders faster than DVDA (unconfirmed). Two findings:
(1) BUG -- testing with the smaller of my rendered .M2V video files (312 MB), I dropped that file into the Vegas timeline from Windows Explorer (Vegas wouldn't let me drop it in using the internal Explorer window). Timeline played the file fine. When I told it to render back to .M2V using any Blu-ray MPEG2 templates (the standard Blu-ray templates or the new one which worked with narrower bitrate settings [see #2 below]), Vegas hangs. CPU on the process is low, can't cancel -- need to kill the Vegas process. Re-rendering this .M2V as an .AVC file works fine, but rendering this .M2V to any .M2V (MPEG2 Blu-ray) template hangs Vegas. Has anyone else ever experienced this? Same behavior in V14 and V17.

(2) QUESTION -- I was able to re-render the main video file (larger) using custom settings, and when I kept the max bitrate lower (and low-end higher), DVDA accepted it without requiring a re-render. What are the acceptable ranges we can put in there before DVDA complains?