Blu-Ray~DVD Backup & Conversion

[jdobbs]

None at all.

I could probably take the feature and output it as a movie-only DVD easy enough, but converting menus and extras would be over-the-top in terms of difficulty.

[Sharc]

I did not even think about menus and extras. Movie-only would meet the purpose best anyway in view of preserving the quality of the BD.
There is a similar discussion ongoing here btw:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1189321#post1189321

[jdobbs]

It makes a lot more sense to consider going the other way (DVD to BD-5) -- the quality you're going to get out of MPEG-2 at DVD speeds is the limit, not the source quality. As they say -- you can only fit five pounds of sh*t into a five pound bag.

[Sharc]

All true, but I cannot playback a BD-5 on a "legacy" DVD standalone, and by far not all DVD are well mastered, means if those are converted to BD-5....garbage in, garbage out. I would expect in general good/better quality from BD sources though, even if downconverted to mpeg2 - but maybe I am wrong.

[jdobbs]

Yeah. I was just thinking about that. The "Lonesome Dove" cut that I bought on DVD was really disappointing. It was 4:3 and very washed-out/blocky throughout.

While they didn't do a stellar job on the blu-ray version of "Lonesome Dove" either, it is infinitely better than the DVD version. So I guess there are times you can just do better by downconverting. Not sure how I'd do that with DVD Rebuilder since it's locked into VIDEO_TS format for its source. But I could probably add it as an option at some point to BD Rebuilder.

[Sharc]

...... But I could probably add it as an option at some point to BD Rebuilder.
Thanks for considering.:)

[blutach]

As they say -- you can only fit five pounds of sh*t into a five pound bag.Please note that the amount a bag will hold is based on volume and not weight. Of course, if the bag is constructed of lightweight materials, it will break after 5 lbs. :D :D :D

Regards

[jdobbs]

Ok. You can only fit 5 pounds of sh*t in a bag that has an maximum limit of 5 pounds... at least that was my experience with burning bags on porches when I was a kid.

A few years ago that was a fairly common saying and everyone took it as fact... then Terry Welsh applied Lempel-Ziv compression to data, and I realized that if take the water out of the sh*t -- you can fit much more...

I retract my statement. :)

[kevdriver]

Jdobbs, Been reading through this thread for a while now. I have been doing this exact thing recently but by other means then backing-up........ :rolleyes: I also have used DVDrebuilder for several years now (pro) and would be very interesting in testing this upcoming release for you. I have a standard stand alone player ( Yamaha) and a BD stand alone player ( Sony BDP-S350 ), as well as a GGW-H20L in my puter.

This possiblity of doing BDs' to DVD 5 and DVD9s in very intriqing and if you need help testing this I'd be happy to give it a whirl. :)

My results from putting a BD movie only with 5/1 audio on to a dvd5 has been great. The sony player recognizes it as a BD and it looks and sounds great. It would be nice to be able to backup my own few BD movies though for prosperity purposes.

[dontasciime]

Hopefully it will be available to buy/donate/soon

[Sophocles]

kevdriver?

I used to know someone with that nick, but he hasn't been around for quite some time. I'm guessing that you are one and the same?


OK guys! I just received a financial windfall called "MAP (Merit award program" which was rather sizable and since BD players are coming down in price I should be able to spring for one. Not having had any real interest in them (but my wife will) until now I need some recommendations.

[jdobbs]

The Sony BDP-S350 has dropped about $100 and is now running about $299. I got the BDP-S301 and have been very satisfied.

[kevdriver]

The only experience I've had is with the Sony 350. I've been very pleased with it up to now. Works well and seems to produce a fine HD video and audio.


@Soph..... check PM. :thanks:

[G_M_C]

kevdriver?
[...]
Not having had any real interest in them (but my wife will) until now I need some recommendations.

I'm a fan of the Panasonics; Good firmware-support, fast startup times, and with recent firmwares it plays everything i have thrown at it, including DTS-MA and so forth (except AVC @ 576p :confused: ).

My tip: Dont hasten your decision, spend some time on AVSForum's Blu-ray section (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdisplay.php?f=149). Just browse around there, and mind things like frequent posts with firmware-updates (might be a signal for good support), or frequent posts concerning bugs. The idea beeing that you get a general idea about a player.

But also keep in mind that this is the internet and people will post problems sooner that merrits; So if you find very little about a rerasonably well-know player, it could very well be that it also is a good player :cool:

[Sophocles]

My tip: Dont hasten your decision, spend some time on AVSForum's Blu-ray section.

Sounds like a plan that hopefully will see some of these new lowered prices come into effect. I figure either Sony or Panasonic would be good choices since they both support AVCHD. I have decent playing home built systems so I'm in no hurry, but the wife will enjoy a standalone better.

[jdobbs]

BD Rebuilder is coming along nicely. I think it's close to being ready for beta...

[rack04]

BD Rebuilder is coming along nicely. I think it's close to being ready for beta...

Great news. Thanks jdobbs.

[kevdriver]

BD Rebuilder is coming along nicely. I think it's close to being ready for beta...


Sounds great.......... Now that being said..... If you need a extra tester to run this before commercial release........... :devil::devil::p Just dying to try this out !

[rack04]

Are the X264 settings going to be customizable and are you planning on using a current version of x264 with the latest patches?

[jdobbs]

Are the X264 settings going to be customizable and are you planning on using a current version of x264 with the latest patches?
You'll be locked (for the most part) into the settings. That's the only way to avoid having to respond to self-inflicted injuries caused by settings. I may open it up a little later.

I will require using the version shipped with BD-RB for any bug reports. Again, there are so many versions/patches of x264 floating around that doing it any other way just causes problems.

[kevdriver]

Actually that makes sense for the beta.......... test it in a set enviornment and see how she goes............ at least any buggies that may creep up you'll know everybody is using the same variables.

[GZZ]

It will be great to test BD-RB and see how it works. Will the beta be a movie-only (maybe selectable audio and maybe subtitles ??) and is it possible to include menu (reencoding it offcourse and then include it) ?

[jdobbs]

Doing movie-only is very easy. Right now I'm testing complete backups (with menus) in the alpha.

[Sophocles]

Doing movie-only is very easy. Right now I'm testing complete backups (with menus) in the alpha.

Generally I do movie only unless I am working with episodic's or concert footage which can have both LPCM and AC3 tracks. On some movies I have menus if it contains multiple surround sound versions since I always have more than one playback station. The capability of H/X.264 compression quality could make keeping menus more attractive.

[dansanhdieu]

Certainly sounds more efficient but I'm driven to check the result before burning.

I just converted The Italian Job from HD DVD to BD and it came in at 4.37 gb which is calling pretty close but it did burn to a single layer. The encode time took 4 hours and 18 minutes which suggests that I saved around 3 hours or so by moving to quad core. The movie played perfectly all the way through.



Dear Sophocles ,

I got a E6320 running at 1.86Ghz at the moment that i am looking to upgrade to Quadcore . Base on recent test and calculation it will took me 24 hours to encode 2 hours movie to 1080p 2 pass . Will i just need to upgrade the CPU or also the RAM ? Can you tell me how long is your movie that took 4 hour to encode and also your full spec ?

I done a few successful back up from BD to DVD5 and looking to do more in the future but 24 hours for a movie is too much time

[jdobbs]

I'd say that's the biggest drawback to BD backups right now. They just take a long, long time. But -- if you go back to 2004 when DVD Rebuilder came out -- the backup times for DVD seemed long too. It doesn't take long for processors to catch up to the need. In the meantime you have to always assume you are going to let your backup run overnight.

[Sophocles]

dansanhdieu

A quad core of similar speed will shave significant time off but get a quad that is also a core 2 but with a higher clock speed, and you will shave a lot of time off. Right now the Q6600's are going for less than $200 and with a modest overclock to 2.8 you will greatly increase your encode speeds. You didn't tell me what the make and model of your motherboard is but it is very likely that you will only need to upgrade your processor and you stay with your current memory.

What jdobbs says is true about early encodes with RB. It used to take me about 3 and a half hours for a typical movie. I've built a new rig recently and that has given me a lot of extra horse power that should keep my BD copies to less than 6 hours and most less than 5 hours.

[dansanhdieu]

dansanhdieu

A quad core of similar speed will shave significant time off



I got a Gigabyte Motherboard 965P-DS3P which can handle the Q6600 as it say on the cover . Look like Q6600 is the sweet pot right now for quadcore cpu . 24hours is too long for 1 movie i will be happy with around 6-7 hours

[oRBIT]

@jdobbs: Can you *please* use gif/png images as buttons in the window classic skin in BD-Rebuilder instead of JPEG's as you're obviously using now in DVD Rebuilder? :)
There's lots of "noise" in the drive-buttons which is equal to high compression jpeg's, anyway it annoys me. :-)

[GZZ]

Another thing that came to my mind. Have anyone of you figured out how to take bluray subtitles (normally in 1920x1080 resolution) and 'reencode' them to 1280x720 so they can be shown on a 720p movie. At the moment I think the only solution is to do OCR on the bluray subtitles and then use the SRT file ind tsremux. But doing the OCR spelling errors and all that will happen. I havent found any solution to this. (thats why I only do 1920x1080 rip with the org. subtitles from Bluray).

But anyone got a solution for this and what about BD-RB, will it handle subtitles correct for 720p movies ?

[jdobbs]

I haven't added resizing for that very reason -- but frankly I haven't done any testing. For all I know the original 1920x1080 subtitle might work on a resized 1280x720 movie... anyone tried it?

[JohnGalt]

@jdobbs: Can you *please* use gif/png images as buttons in the window classic skin in BD-Rebuilder instead of JPEG's as you're obviously using now in DVD Rebuilder? :)
There's lots of "noise" in the drive-buttons which is equal to high compression jpeg's, anyway it annoys me. :-)

You can always use a different skin. My preference is for "Teck Original." Alternatively, you can, of course, design your own!

[GZZ]

I have tried to mux 1920x1080 subtitles to a 1280x720 movie and the solution is that you can select the subtitles, but none are shown. I think they are shown outside of the picture. Thats why I dont do 1280x720 movies and stick to 1920x1080.

If anyone know how to resize the subtitles from full to half HD then please advice. :)

[Ulf]

I have tried to mux 1920x1080 subtitles to a 1280x720 movie and the solution is that you can select the subtitles, but none are shown. I think they are shown outside of the picture. Thats why I dont do 1280x720 movies and stick to 1920x1080.

If anyone know how to resize the subtitles from full to half HD then please advice. :)

I make a post in the Subtitles section on that subject (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=121535&page=36). It deals with a way of downscaling 1080p subtitles to 720p with high quality.

[dansanhdieu]

I have successful back up the Internal Affairs Hong Kong Movie with 1 5.1 sound track and 1 subtitle track using Ripbot264 . It took me total of 20 hours to encode it to BD-5 .

Test the disc with my LG Computer Drive and PS3 both working perfect . Thank for all the help in this thread .

During the playback on my PS3 i have found a problem with the BD-5 when you press skip to next chapter , the screen turn off flickering go black and took a few sec before it jump to next chapter . Tried again the original disc skip chapter fine . After 1 hour playing around with my PS3 settings i found out that i need to turn off BD 1080p 24 Hz Output setting in my PS3 in order for the BD-5 jump back and forward on chapter .

Strangely with the Original Disc working fine with bot setting ON and OFF . Have anyone here got this problem before ?

[jdobbs]

I make a post in the Subtitles section on that subject (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=121535&page=36). It deals with a way of downscaling 1080p subtitles to 720p with high quality.Cool. I'll check it out and if it is had potential I'll see what I can do about adding it.

[laserfan]

I expended bandwidth earlier in this thread about the BD5 creation process resulting in a "Disc Error" on my BD player, the LG BH200. G_M_C mentioned that the newest firmware disabled AVCHD compatibility--well I found out that it also disabled BD5/BD9 compatibility. Why, I have no idea, but I downgraded the BH200's firmware to the previous version and my several discs-thought-to-be-coasters now play just fine. So I'm primed/ready for BD Rebuilder! :)

[Sharc]

Just curious: Will a future version of BD Rebuilder include a crf (1-pass) mode with a "size vs crf factor estimate" pass?:rolleyes:

[jdobbs]

I already have it in -- but it isn't very accurate.

[laserfan]

It all depends whether you are worried about compatibility. For example, even through a large GOP works fine on my player, I've changed it to 24 so I can ensure it is within standards. If in your case that isn't important, then you don't need to worry about it.

I've been watching these backups and I gotta' tell you -- they look damn good. I'm very pleased with this whole concept of backing up BDs to DVD-5/9. :)Now that my standalone is playing my BD5 discs, I have come to the realization that my earlier reports of "blockiness" and posterization appear unfounded and are owing to my PC playback!!! :eek:

Omigosh, if I use PDVD, or MPC with the Cyberlink h264 decoder, I get the originals to display perfect frames, albe-them stuttery, and the conversions play smoothly, but with blockiness!!!! My gosh, I don't know what this is about. If I de-select the Cyberlink decoder and use ffdshow/libavcodec, I do also see perfect (non-blocky) frames from my much-lower bitrate x264 encodings, but they don't play smoothly. So I can get "smooth but blocky" or "stuttery but unblocky" but as a result my PC as set-up is useless to ID quality-out from my conversion process.

I am appalled that this occurs and I can't seem to figure out how to fix it--if anyone has tips for me I'd sure like to hear them. As I said I'm using now MediaPlayerClassic and Cyberlink PowerDVD Ultra v7.3 and know just enough about MPC filter settings to be dangerous. :o

Next I'll download CoreAVC and see if that mates-up with MPC to give best playback (do I get the $15 or the $20 version?).

BTW I read somewhere that the keyint value strictly/only affects seekability and not compatibility fwiw...

[jdobbs]

I recently stopped using CoreAVC and went back to FFDSHOW as my default codec. I found a couple of commercial sources that would create errors with CoreAVS when used with AVISYNTH, but played fine in FFDSHOW. The speed increase wasn't much greater anyway.

[laserfan]

I recently stopped using CoreAVC and went back to FFDSHOW as my default codec. I found a couple of commercial sources that would create errors with CoreAVS when used with AVISYNTH, but played fine in FFDSHOW. The speed increase wasn't much greater anyway.Thanks for that. I will focus on ffdshow then for the time being. Do you (or anyone) have any idea why these codecs might behave as I described? Like they have two modes, one that prioritizes Quality (accuracy) and another that prioritizes Speed (smoothness of fps)? This really has my head spinning around...

[Sophocles]

Omigosh, if I use PDVD, or MPC with the Cyberlink h264 decoder, I get the originals to display perfect frames, albe-them stuttery

I use PowerDVD to playback my copies and they play wonderfully. The only complaint that I have was that I had PowerDVD 7 to play back HD DVD and then HD DVD went down so PowerDVD began version 8 for BD but had no support for HD DVD. So I had both versions 7 and 8 installed and then along comes an update for version 7. The update made version compatible with BD which means that it now plays both HD DVD and BD which also means that I didn't need to update to version 8.

OK enough with the rant. PowerDVD ultra versions does everything that I want it to do without any sign of stuttering. I would have considered a free version playback but I wanted all the surround sound codecs for my surround sounds speaker system.

[laserfan]

I use PowerDVD to playback my copies and they play wonderfully.My CPU (P4 3.2GHz) and Videocard (X1950PRO AGP) must be inadequate to the task. :o

...PowerDVD...an update for version 7. The update made version compatible with BD which means that it now plays both HD DVD and BD which also means that I didn't need to update to version 8.I've stuck with the PDVD7 version (I think 3319a OTTOMH) that still allows opening of files on the hard disk, and disc file structures as well ('Open movie file on hard disk' I think it's called). If the latest update retained these I'd go for it...

[Sophocles]

My CPU (P4 3.2GHz) and Videocard (X1950PRO AGP) must be inadequate to the task.

The P4 should be fast enough, but your graphics card could be an issue. The best bet is to get a graphics card that includes video acceleration. On older cards that's more likely to be an ATI card than a Nvidia card. what is the make and model of your cards?

[laserfan]

The P4 should be fast enough, but your graphics card could be an issue. The best bet is to get a graphics card that includes video acceleration. On older cards that's more likely to be an ATI card than a Nvidia card. what is the make and model of your cards?Mine's the Sapphire ATI X1950PRO 512Mb AGP. Doesn't have hw accel for 264 though, at least I don't think it does.

I just DL'ed CoreAVC and amazingly, it is wildly better than the Cyberlink decoder or FFDShow. All the blockiness is gone and stays in-sync always tho I still do get the stutters sometimes.

Looks like a keeper for sure--I'd never have guessed the codec could make such a huge difference!!!?!! :eek:

[laserfan]

I did finally have a chance to look more critically at my LFODH backup to BD5, using my LG BH200 and 10' 1080p projector, and it is truly awesome. I understand much better now jdobb's enthusiasm for the 264 codec!

I also made a BD5 (x264) of a DL std def DVD and it too looks like the original.

The only glitch I have noticed so far is that at least on my standalone, when changing to a new chapter stop the audio loses sync, sometimes momentarily and sometimes "for good" unless I hit FF and Play, and then sync is regained. It's as if the Chapter Marks might lie in the middle of a GOP or something and audio sync gets lost. Maybe a tsMuxeR issue or just that the chapter marks from the original program don't match-up with I-frames (is that still the right term for x264?) in the new encoding, I dunno.

But this method is a "WOW" for sure! :)

[jdobbs]

Make sure you manually specify the frame rate before muxing.

[GZZ]

Make sure you manually specify the frame rate before muxing.

I also have a chapter problem on my PS3, the picture freeze for 2 seconds, before playback continue, some chapters does work, others dont.

Should I select Change FPS and set it manually to the framerate, because tsmuxer normally get the FPS from stream, isnt that the best to do ?

[laserfan]

Yeah fps=23.976 is specified in my tsMuxeR command. I suspect a glitch in tsMuxeR or as I said a mismatch between specified Chapter frames and the new encoding's I frames.

As I type this I'm not sure if --auto-chapters=5 generates the issue also. :confused: