From someone who has a BluRay player and knows how to burn a regular DVD using Toast, but nothing more than that, 2 questions if I may:
1) I assume that this disc you made can be played in a BluRay player?
2) Can one take a regular DVD, RIP it, and then encode it the way you did?
Thanks
Hi, yes, the Blu-ray disk that I burned can be played in a Blu-ray player. It is a Blu-ray video disk, not a Blu-ray data disk with a video file on it, which is an important difference. Toast can only do Blu-ray data disks by itself. You can use Toast to create a video disk, but you will need Encore to create the .iso file that Toast will use to create the video disk. An interesting side note, I read where someone broke the 25gb barrier with Encore by taking something like 4hrs of hi-def video, using Encore to create the .iso file (+25gb), and using Toast to burn the .iso to a dual-layer 50gb Blu-ray BD-R disk. I'll have to try that one out. As far as a Blu-ray player goes, the only player I have is a PS3, and my disk worked perfectly in it, menus and all, but I can't vouch for any other players. To answer your second question, I suppose you can take a regular DVD, rip it and encode it as I did, but it won't raise the quality of your video, if that's what you're aiming for. You really need hi-def video footage to start with.
Great great info, thanks for all the updates. Looks like your the first one on here to actually get blu-ray to work on a mac. How much RAM do you have in your new Mac Pro 3.2? I'm trying to figure out why it takes so long to do the encode. With Premiere doing over 500%, it's definitely picking up over 5 of the cores. I know with compressor there ways to utilize nearly all 800% of an 8 core Mac Pro, according to barefeats.com.
I wonder if the long encode times are part of the reason why Apple has been hesitant on adding blu-ray support to it's Mac Pro line up. 15 hours to encode reminds me of the early days of DVD burning on quicksilver g4s. But at least there is a way. I would love to see how to optimize the encore down to under 10 hours, so at least it can be done as an overnight render.
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I only have 2gb of RAM in my machine. I really should get more. I too was a bit surprised at how long it takes, but it was a 2-pass encode, but I'm not really sure that should make for 15hr encoding. I dunno, kind of new to Hi-Def DVD creation, and even newer to the Mac platform, so maybe there are some settings, tweaks and the like that need to be investigated. I burned Blu-ray on a 3.6ghz Pentium 4 PC a few times, and it took about 12hrs for a little over an hour of HiDef encoding, and that was only 1 pass (vs. 2.5 hrs of hi-def video at 2 passes in 15hrs on the Mac). The software I used on the PC was Sonic DVDit Pro HD. It's pretty feature rich, but had its share of problems and limitations. For one, no H.264 on Blu-ray, only MPG. Secondly, it didn't do a good job of indexing the MPG video. I'd place a chapter marker right in between two scenes, but in reality, the chapter marker was 10-20 seconds off the mark. I'd scroll frame by frame until I found the scene change, but frame by frame movement wasn't really accurate. Secondly, there were a lot of defects in the encoded video. A lot of segments where the footage would pixelate and fill the screen with giant blocky artifacts and the audio would go in and out. At first I thought it might be a defect on the blu ray disk itself, but this was not the case when I went back into the project and checked the video. I could, however, add subtitles to the Blu-ray disk with Sonic (no can do with Blu-ray in Encore), which was nice, because I would place the date/time information of the original footage in the subtitle track so I could see when the scenes were originally shot with the flick of the subtitle button on the remote, then make it go away when I didn't want to see that info. The Adobe products, while they too are buggy, produce absolutely beautiful hi-def video on Blu-ray. Smooth, sharp, great color, really nice, and defect-free.
