dvd folders to Blu-ray

[cdavid]

I have a lot of series that I have broken into individual episodes. The episodes are in dvd folder format uncompressed. What I'd like to do is take as many episodes and put them on a blu-ray. I'd like to play them back in a BR player as if they were on a high-capacity dvd.

Any help getting me going in the right direct is appreciated.

[Mauser]

Gonna be a learning curve...

I am sure there are many people who know much more about this than I do, but I'll take a shot at it. I suspect you are going to have lots of problems doing what you want, especially if your current disc format is not H.264.

The biggest problem is going to be the total re-encoding that just about any software package is going to insist on to convert to BD format, and this process will often increase the file sizes to such a large extent that you get absolutely NO benefit from the BD25 size even after spending MANY hours waiting on the authoring. When I first started experimenting with BD burning, I found that almost all the software that I tried (free and retail both) insisted on this wasteful process even when I was starting with clean H.264 files! And my testing was complicated by the fact that I demanded the ability to create disc menus so that I could actually see what was recorded and pick the specific programs I wanted for playback - something that I assume you will also need for packing multiple programs on one big disc.

So here is what I finally found that works very well for me, based simply on the types of discs I make.

First, at least 50% of my recordings are made from H.264 captures of HD recordings on my TiVo boxes. I do these captures with a Hauppauge 1212 PVR (very buggy and problematic tool, but really the only option out there IMHO). The 1212 comes with a proprietary copy of ArcSoft TotalMedia Extreme, and this software is CRITICAL to my process. TME does not provide the best editing platform for authoring programs to AVCHD or DVD, but it is usable. The Best thing about TME is the fact that is not only allows the creation of menus for disc authoring, but it does an outstanding job of accepting properly formatted H.264 files for authoring WITHOUT re-encoding them, which saves both lots of time and storage space on the output discs.

The Hauppauge version of TME does not allow authoring of BD discs, but there is a simple workaround for that which I will cover below.

Besides the HD captures I do with the 1212, I also record a lot of SD programs from the TiVos, and for these (or ANY program that needs a lot of editing, such as one with commercials), I use VideoReDo - not a free program, but well worth the cost for all it does! On the plus side, VRD provides an outstanding editing platform and great capabilities to save files in LOTS of different formats. It is great if you want to author DVDs, and it will do this directly. BUT, it does not author AVCHD or BD discs.

So my BD authoring process uses TME to create the AVCHD/BD disc structure, and VRD to edit and create H.264 files that TME will accept without re-encoding (VRD is not needed at all if the source files were originally captured from the 1212 by TME and you do not want to use the advanced editing capabilities of VRD).

To author a BD25 from TME, you simply do it exactly like you were creating an AVCHD/DVD disc, but keep adding files up to 25GB, then author the disc to the hard drive. Then you simply use DVDFab to write that folder directly to a BD blank without any further changes.

Based on the information in your post, I suspect your only option is going to be to use something like VRD to convert your existing programs to H.264 format, then another program like TME to author the BD discs, and finally a third program like DVDFab or imageburn to burn those discs. You certainly may find a single software package to do it all for you, but I did not. Maybe DVDFab will be the answer when they finally add menu support to the disc authoring process.

As luck would have it, the Hauppauge HD-PVR 1212 is currently on sale at BestBuy and Amazon for about $160 - not super cheap, but it would allow you to capture playback of your current programs without using any other package to convert the format to H.264. The biggest drawback of that process is that it is real-time capture only. Good luck.