Trying to find the right burning software

[barbera66]

I am trying to archive past seasons of football games I have to create some disk space. I have a blu ray burner and a decently powerful computer. I have found a few different programs, but none seem to be able to meet all of my basic needs. So basically i need a recommendation that meets these requirements:

-Burn multiple file types (avi, mkv, mp4, etc. Most software I've looked at doesn't burn less used types such as .mkv)

-Create simple menus. Nothing fancy, but I'd like to be able to pick which game on the blu ray i would like to watch without having to skip through all the games before it. A picture preview would be nice to have too, but not necessary.

-This one may be pushing it, but I have seen DVD authoring software that can automatically compress the files (obviously degrading quality) to fit onto the disc. I wouldn't want to compress too much, but a GB or so may be necessary in some situations

Once again sorry if this is the wrong place to ask, but I figured somebody here could help me. Thank you!

(if it matters I'm using only 25GB discs)

And one last thing: The games are HD, but of varying resolution. I would like to be able to conserve space on the disk, if possible, by burning some of the clips at their native higher res, and some of the clips at their native lower res

[manolito]

Hi barbera66, and welcome to the forum!

Your title seems to be a little misleading, you say that you are looking for the right Burning Software, but after reading your post it seems more that you need a BlueRay Authoring Application.

-Burn multiple file types (avi, mkv, mp4, etc. Most software I've looked at doesn't burn less used types such as .mkv)
You can of course just burn your source files to a data BlueRay disk. Then you really only need some burning software which can handle BlueRay. Create a tree structure with folders named in a way so you can recognize your files, then drag your source files into these folders and burn a BD. This disk will play in your computer the same way as if the files were on your HDD. But I think this is not what you really want...

-Create simple menus. Nothing fancy, but I'd like to be able to pick which game on the blu ray i would like to watch without having to skip through all the games before it. A picture preview would be nice to have too, but not necessary.
This is the domain of an Authoring application.

This one may be pushing it, but I have seen DVD authoring software that can automatically compress the files (obviously degrading quality) to fit onto the disc. I wouldn't want to compress too much, but a GB or so may be necessary in some situations
If you want to compress your source files, you have to reencode them. For DVDs there is a method called 'Compressed Domain Transcoding' (CDT) which does not perform a complete decoding and reencoding (it decodes only to the macroblock level and reuses all the motion vectors). This is much faster than a complete reencoding, but at the cost of quality.

For BlueRay such a method does not exist, you will have to do a complete reencode. And since your source files are HD, you probably should use the H.264 format (not MPEG2 or DivX/XviD).


Having said all this, I believe your best bet would be multiAVCHD. Take a look at the first post in the multiAVCHD thread and study the list of its features.


Good luck
manolito