[Bob Linsdell]

“albeit via the option” That’s the Option button on the WD media player’s remote control.

[Bob Linsdell]

I have several WD media players connected to network drives over a 1Gb wired network.

I create a Sony AVC video file and Wav file, combine them in an MKV wrapper and add subtitles and chapters.

My AVC settings (for progressive video) are:
Frame Size: 1280×720
Profile: Main
Entropy: CABAC
Frame rate: 59.940 (Double NTSC)
Field Order: Progressive scan
Pixel Aspect: 1.0000
Bit Rate: 21,999,616
Encode: Automatic

Audio is encoded as:
PCM (uncompressed)
48KHz
16bit
Stereo

These play very well across my network and serve as quality backups of my projects. The video bit rate can be increased to 25,999,360 bps in Vegas Pro 11, but at that bit rate DVDA claims it’s not Blu-ray compliant! This wouldn’t be a problem in your case.

The WD media player can display the subtitles and use the chapters, albeit via the option; its not ideal but it works.

[Bob Linsdell]

According to this website: https://www.blu-ray.com/faq/

The maximum bitrate is 54.0Mbps for audio and video combined.

So, using the maximum Sony AVC bitrate setting of around 20Mbps should be fine.

[Bob Linsdell]

Thanks. I hadn’t considered the UpRez option.

[Bob Linsdell]

I always keep the DV format file.

Over the past eight years I’ve gone back and used the DV file several times (I had them backed up at one point on two sets of 100+ DVDs). I now have them on Blu-ray and external hard discs – three hard discs; one at home, one at work, and one at a relatives.

I’ve been converting my DV to 1920x1080i 29.97fps 16MBps AVC with uncompressed audio (wav). I currently have a post to see if someone has any thoughts on rendering to 720x480i AVC, and letting the Blu-ray player or TV do the conversion to 1080i.

My understanding is that AVC gives a better result than Mpeg-2 for the same file size; hence I use AVC.

I’m sure you’re aware of this, but it wasn’t clear from your post: While doing your tests you can just render a short section and see how it looks.

[Bob Linsdell]

I’ve just realized that if when playing the disc, the user starts off playing at a chapter mid way through one of the AVC files, then the ‘Previous’ button will not take them back to an earlier AVC file. But, once the user hits a button that gets them into the Playlist, i.e. the first chpter of an AVC file (or one AVC plays to the end and another one starts), then everything works fine.

[Bob Linsdell]

Additional notes on using playlists as suggested in my earlier post:

• The first chapter button for an AVC file has to link to the AVC’s name in the Playlist.
• All other chapter buttons link directly to the chapters/markers of the AVC file.
• The ‘End Action’ of the AVC files have to link to the next AVC’s name in the Playlist, except for the last AVC file where it is left at the default value of ‘Most recent menu’.

[Bob Linsdell]

“The only thing I wish I could do is speed up the 3-hour render, but on the other hand I didn’t sit there and watch it! :)”

With DVDA Pro it is possible to have multiple AVC files work as one big file, and allow navigation between (next and previous) the files as if they were one. I do all my Blu-ray discs this way. Doing it this way allows me to make minor edits to one clip and create a new disc without rendering a massive file, moving subtitles or selecting new frames for numerous chapter buttons because an earlier clip has changed in duration. Also, I can have a menu button to just play one of the AVC files and have it return to the menu when finished, or a button to view a subset of the full movie with the AVC files in any order I choose when building the project.

It’s a little more complex to setup, but I feel it’s worth the effort. If you’re interested in how this is done, see my post in the thread “Small Clips – One Big Movie” and the below image.

However, there is a limit to how many files I can have in the root folder of the DVDA project. See post “Sony DVD Architect Pro 5.2 Crash – too many media files?”

[Bob Linsdell]

I also view my movies via media players (Western Digital TV Live). I also create Blu-ray discs.

I render to Blue-ray AVC and WAV for the audio, and then combine them into an MKV file using ‘mkvmerge GUI’. This takes about two minutes for a 30 minute movie. The benefit of putting the audio and video files into an mkv wrapper is that I can also add chapters and subtitles.

With chapters I can jump to specific points, and the subtitles are used for additional information about the video.

I have found these mkv files to be quite playable on numerous PCs and WD TV Live players. The AVC format is the standard for Blu-ray, so I have confidence that it will be well supported; some Blu-ray players now support MKV files as well as AVCHD files.

[Bob Linsdell]

I had the same problem, and found a solution, albeit not perfect. I was using Sony Vegas Pro 10 to render to AVC.

The problem only occurred when rendering MJPEG/AVI video. The problem was intermittent, often occurring where two clips overlapped, and sometimes for part of a clip. Reinstalling Vegas and my CODECs didn’t fix it, and I didn’t want to lose a week of my life re-installing my OS and apps.

What worked for me was to reduce the video track level to 97.5%.

I checked my finished movies for bad areas using VirtualDub; put the AVC file in an MKV wrapper using ‘mkvmerge GUI’ and then use VirtualDub’s scene scan feature to find problem areas.