Trying to put it all together

[Ken Jarstad]

Well, as I said I already have the Sony Blu-ray player which we picked up last Christmas for a pretty reasonable price. I had been reading about making Blu-ray compatible standard DVDs and tried several times unsuccessfully. My mistake was trying to make an actual Blu-ray!

I found out that Blu-ray players must include three codecs; in addition to the Blu-ray codec they must support Microsoft's VC-1 and the AVCHD MPEG-4 h.264 codec. Blu-ray may actually read from a disk at as much as 54 Mb/s which the standard DVD can't do. My early disks would play for a moment, pause, play for a moment, pause, and so on. The breakthrough came when I quit trying to make a Blu-ray disk and made an AVCHD disk. All newer players will have AVCHD on the front.

My first attempt was to add an 8 minute .m2t file to Nero Vision and select to burn to a regular DVD. It plays beautifully on the Blu-ray player! I read that regular DVD media will limit you to about 20 minutes without additional compression and some folks say they put as much as 40 minutes on a disk without problem. I have not tried anything more than 8 minutes yet. 20 to 40 minutes is plenty for home video and will placate me until the cost of Blu-ray burners and media come down. This means we home movie makers finally have a low cost way to distribute our videos.

[Bobby]

Thanks Ken. Could you please detail the Nero steps / settings you used? Thanks...

[Paul LS]

Hi Ken,
I only produce AVCHD discs... I agree, 30 minutes on a DVD is more than enough. I have been using Ulead DVD Moviefactory for the last couple of years for this, it comes with some pretty neat menus with and with some sophisticated transitioning between menus. Unfortunately Corel bought out Ulead a couple of years back and discountinued DVD Moviefactory.
What aggrevates me is that virtually all video editors now can create AVCHD discs.. apart that is from Adobe. And I am pretty sure that they wont be including it in the next release.
So I export from Premiere Elements as high definition H.264 and use this in DVD Moviefactory. Moviefactory cam smart burn the files to AVCHD discs without re-rendering therefore maintaining the high quality. Unfortunately NERO does not do this.
Paul.

[Ken Jarstad]

Here is a straightforward guide to burning an AVCHD disk with Nero Burning ROM:
http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/burn_avchd_with_nero_burning_rom.cfm

Here is another guide complete with menu creation in Nero Vision:
http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/complete_nero_vision_5_avchd_authoring_guide.cfm

The first steps are - Make a DVD/AVCHD.

I have Nero 8 which includes Nero Vision 5. Among others, file import includes:
MPEG video files: .mpg .mpeg .mpe .m2p .m2v
MPEG-4 files: .mp4
MPEG-2 Transport Stream Files: .m2ts .ts .m2t .mts .trp

Also the Content screen actions include 'Import AVCHD from hard drive.....'

I have the full Nero 8 package with the optional Blu-ray plug-in but some guides claim that even the OEM versions include Nero Vision and have been able to burn regular DVDs as AVCHD disk since Nero Vision 3. Nero has a good encoder. Too bad it isn't 'smart.'

[Bobby]

Thanks Ken - it looks like the critical thing is the UDF file system - the rest looks fairly straightforward.