BD Rebuilder Manual or user Guide?

[-Jim-]

Folks,

I've tried searching but I can't seem to find a BD Rebuilder Manual, or user Guide. I'm not a total newbie but some direction / features explanation would be helpful.

Our needs are really quite simple I want to make BD-R 25 back-ups of Movies / Concerts we have so I let family play them on a Samsung BluRay Home Theater system we have at the Cabin. We just want the main movie, a 5.1 soundtrack (DTS or DD), Menus to select Chapters, and English subtitles.

A cyber buddy (owine) from another Forum where I was looking at ClownBD suggested "BD Rebuilder does exactly what you're looking for."

Is there a Movie only option where you can select these options?

Thanks jdobbs for doing all the grunt work. I bet there were some long nights getting this far.:thanks:

Thanks for the assist.

[jdobbs]

I've started or continued on one several times... but it keeps getting back-burnered.

I know it needs to be done... since it's freeware, I sometimes hope someone else will do one that I can borrow.

A good rule for consideration, though, is that if you don't provide a manual... everyone will want one. If you do provide a manual... no one will read it. ;)

[-Jim-]

jdobbs,

Thanks for the prompt reply.

Even though I'm male, I don't agree with your "If you do provide a manual... no one will read it." :rolleyes:

I read manuals to save me from myself :o, so I don't make the really stupid, and sometimes expensive, mistakes.

But as I have a nasty cold, and could not get to sleep before 2:30 am last night, I decided to "go for it" and see what BD Rebuilder could do.

I followed the instructions in your first post "BD Rebuilder Beta - Bug Reports Only" OMG - 742 pages of Bugs - what am I in for...:scared:

I Ghosted my OS (Win 7 64) onto a spare drive with all relavent updates, and latest nVidia video driver. (This was to maximise performance and eliminate any possible software conflicts.) I then downloaded, installed, and ran all programs you instructed from there.

After the installs, you said run ""Video Decoder Configuration" for FFDSHOW from the "START/Programs" menu, and make sure MPEG2 decoding is enabled. Do the same using "Audio Decoder Configuration" to ensure "Uncompressed" is set to "All Supported"". With my watery eyes I couldn't find where to enable these on the versions I downloaded, so I thought the instruction could be a little dated, and referenced 2008 versions of the software. (As your Thread started in 2008.)

I somehow thought that as I was going for a BD-R25 disk video compression wouldn't be an issue so I'd risk it, and I mucked about with the Audio so I thought I'd get a Dolby Prologic, and a AC3 version, from the PCM & DTS HD tracks. I tweaked BD Rebuilder settings (including double clicking on the DTS Soundtrack to enable it as the default was disabled) and enabled English only subtitles.

I decided to try using the original BluRay disk as the source to keep it simple (if a little longer to recode I could live with it) and I ran AnyDVD HD in the background.

As I couldn't figure out how to get just the Main Movie and the Menu with the above sound options, I figured I'll just go for the whole thing. So I hit Back up, and turned on a very bad Fantastic 4 movie that was on HDNet, so I could monitor progress until I got sleepy enough to go to bed. With about 25% done at 2:30 PDT, and the bad movie over, I went to bed.

When I got up BD Rebuilder was finished recoding to the 1TB storage Hard Drive. But I couldn't figure out how to play it with either WinDVD, or PowerDVD, as it was just folders. (BluRay structure is relatively new to me.) So I decided to risk a BR-R 25 and burned it with ImgBurn.

I played the disk with WinDVD Pro 11 on my PC. I think I got it all :D but the real test is to play it in a set top player or two. I popped it into a Samsung 3D BluRay Player connected to a 55 inch Samsung 3D TV. It works flawlessly (except I forgot to enable "Remove Prohibitted User Operations" in AnyDVD HD so I've got to wait for all the preambles to complete before the menu appears. I really don't like that and wish Disk Players were allowed to skip right to the Menu by default).

Anyway, I don't think I could see any difference in Video Quality at all. You program was excellent and certainly did the trick going to a BD-R25. Thank you!

The Samsung set-up isn't connected to our Home Theater system. So we'll connect up the Sony PS3 on our 55 Toshiba LED LCD system (my son migrates it to the Samsung whenever he gets a chance) and make sure the sound is performing as well.

Now I wonder what the settings would be for the Movie only BD-R 25 as I described earlier (as I'm concerned there will be some movies where degration would occur when recoding the whole disk to BD-R25 or am I wrong?

I think I'd also like to try to shrink it to a DVD5 so i could play it on my laptop when traveling. I wonder what those settings would be as well...

Thanks for the Program, all the links, and the info here at Doom9.

[-Jim-]

Gents,

I guess I didn't hit a home run my first time at bat.:o

I must have selected the wrong combination of Audio streams, or something as the PS3 cycles the Sony Receiver in and out of the surround sound mode when I select the AC3 stream.

I immediately cross tested the Home Theater System with another DVD in AC3, and the Elton John BluRay which is automatically down coded to regular DTS by the PS3 (from DTS-HD), and there where no issues cycling the Sony Receiver in & out of the surround mode.

I popped the BD Rebuilder version into the PC and ran it with WinDVD Pro 11 to look at the Audio Streams. It seems there are 2 different AC3 audio streams (one 192 Kbps and the other 640 Kbps whick sounds so much better) and not the Dolby Prologic II and AC3 I was hoping for. I suspect the PS3 sees 2 AC Streams and decided it was not to "Standard" BluRay specs and went tilt...

Do you have any hints for the Rookie?

Thanks for the assist.:cool:

[Rich86]

I find the program to be fairly intuitive for the most part and run it with default settings mostly (except for setting everything to get the highest quality pq & aq possible). But I'd love to have a reference to the various default and optional settings that go into the config file (BDREBUILDER.INI). A list of available entries, possible settings or codes and what they each mean would be very valuable.

[-Jim-]

Folks,

It seems I'm posting these as notes for myself :o as no one chimes in with suggestions. (Ooops => Rich86 just chimed in while I was writing this. Thanks. I was feeling lonely :thanks:)

Oh well, as I can't find a manual or guide, and as no one was offering advice, I decided to stumble along again on my own. (At least I'm getting comfortable with the process.)

This time I started fresh with a larger Hard Drive and all clean installs. I also put Alcohol onto the drive so I could mount the AnyDVD ISO I made of the disk to see if that was faster than the last time. I also put on AIDA 64 (the successor to Everest) so I could ensure the Quad Core CPU was using all cores to a reasonable level (It does.)

I reversed the default enabled LCPM audio stream and enabled the DTS in BD Rebuilder => hoping to get a single Quality AC3 Audio Stream. (I'd do a screen shot but it run on a different Hard Drive and therefore not available.) Later on while it was recoding I read a post where if you leave everything on default, on a BD-R25, BD Rebulder automatically recodes to high Bit Rate AC3. (Boy do I look dumb :rolleyes:)

I also saw a few posts where folks were annoyed folks would post problems without posting the log. Here it is:

----------------------
[03/11/12] BD Rebuilder v0.40.08 (beta)
[18:34:21] Source: ELTON_JOHN
- Input BD size: 45.26 GB
- Approximate total content: [05:14:59.380]
- Target BD size: 22.95 GB
- Windows Version: 6.1 [7601]
- Quality: High-Speed Option (BD-25), ABR
- Decoding/Frame serving: DirectShow
- Audio Settings: AC3=0 DTS=1 HD=0 Kbs=640
[18:34:21] PHASE ONE, Encoding
- [18:34:21] Processing: VID_00000 (1 of 10)
- [18:34:21] Extracting A/V streams [VID_00000]
- [18:39:32] Reencoding video [VID_00000]
- Source Video: MPEG-4 (AVC), 1920x1080
- Rate/Length: 29.970fps, 122,841 frames
- Bitrate: 10,763 Kbs
- [18:39:32] Reencoding: VID_00000, Pass 1 of 1
- [20:03:45] Video Encode complete
- [20:03:45] Processing audio tracks
- Track 4353 (eng): Reencoding audio to AC3...
- [20:06:00] Multiplexing M2TS
- [20:09:15] Processing: VID_00001 (2 of 10)
- [20:09:15] Extracting A/V streams [VID_00001]
- [20:12:36] Reencoding video [VID_00001]
- Source Video: MPEG-4 (AVC), 1920x1080
- Rate/Length: 29.970fps, 103,561 frames
- Bitrate: 7,610 Kbs
- [20:12:36] Reencoding: VID_00001, Pass 1 of 1
- [21:13:42] Video Encode complete
- [21:13:42] Processing audio tracks
- Track 4353 (eng): Reencoding audio to AC3...
- [21:15:36] Multiplexing M2TS
- [21:17:27] Processing: VID_00002 (3 of 10)
- [21:17:27] Extracting A/V streams [VID_00002]
- [21:20:23] Reencoding video [VID_00002]
- Source Video: MPEG-4 (AVC), 1920x1080
- Rate/Length: 29.970fps, 95,938 frames
- Bitrate: 6,561 Kbs
- [21:20:23] Reencoding: VID_00002, Pass 1 of 1
- [22:14:44] Video Encode complete
- [22:14:44] Processing audio tracks
- Track 4352 (eng): Reencoding audio to AC3...
- [22:14:54] Multiplexing M2TS
- [22:16:20] Processing: VID_00012 (4 of 10)
- [22:16:20] Extracting A/V streams [VID_00012]
- [22:16:24] Reencoding video [VID_00012]
- Source Video: MPEG-4 (AVC), 1920x1080
- Rate/Length: 29.970fps, 36 frames
- Bitrate: 35,000 Kbs
- [22:16:24] Reencoding: VID_00012, Pass 1 of 1
- [22:16:27] Video Encode complete
- [22:16:27] Processing audio tracks
- Track 4353 (eng): Reencoding audio to AC3...
- [22:16:29] Multiplexing M2TS
- [22:16:33] Processing: VID_00015 (5 of 10)
- [22:16:33] Extracting A/V streams [VID_00015]
- [22:20:42] Reencoding video [VID_00015]
- Source Video: MPEG-4 (AVC), 1920x1080
- Rate/Length: 29.970fps, 122,841 frames
- Bitrate: 8,824 Kbs
- [22:20:42] Reencoding: VID_00015, Pass 1 of 1
- [23:34:43] Video Encode complete
- [23:34:43] Processing audio tracks
- Track 4353 (eng): Reencoding audio to AC3...
- [23:36:57] Multiplexing M2TS
- [23:39:32] Processing: VID_00016 (6 of 10)
- [23:39:32] Extracting A/V streams [VID_00016]
- [23:41:51] Reencoding video [VID_00016]
- Source Video: MPEG-4 (AVC), 1920x1080
- Rate/Length: 29.970fps, 53,891 frames
- Bitrate: 10,839 Kbs
- [23:41:51] Reencoding: VID_00016, Pass 1 of 1
- [00:18:03] Video Encode complete
- [00:18:03] Processing audio tracks
- Track 4353 (eng): Reencoding audio to AC3...
- [00:19:02] Multiplexing M2TS
- [00:20:25] Processing: VID_00017 (7 of 10)
- [00:20:25] Extracting A/V streams [VID_00017]
- [00:22:15] Reencoding video [VID_00017]
- Source Video: MPEG-4 (AVC), 1920x1080
- Rate/Length: 29.970fps, 53,891 frames
- Bitrate: 8,895 Kbs
- [00:22:15] Reencoding: VID_00017, Pass 1 of 1
- [00:53:55] Video Encode complete
- [00:53:55] Processing audio tracks
- Track 4353 (eng): Reencoding audio to AC3...
- [00:54:53] Multiplexing M2TS
- [00:55:56] Processing: VID_00018 (8 of 10)
- [00:55:56] Extracting A/V streams [VID_00018]
- [00:56:02] Reencoding video [VID_00018]
- Source Video: MPEG-4 (AVC), 1920x1080
- Rate/Length: 29.970fps, 1,433 frames
- Bitrate: 8,767 Kbs
- [00:56:02] Reencoding: VID_00018, Pass 1 of 1
- [00:56:43] Video Encode complete
- [00:56:43] Processing audio tracks
- [00:56:43] Multiplexing M2TS
- [00:56:48] Processing: VID_00019 (9 of 10)
- [00:56:48] Extracting A/V streams [VID_00019]
- [00:57:15] Reencoding video [VID_00019]
- Source Video: MPEG-4 (AVC), 1920x1080
- Rate/Length: 29.970fps, 5,881 frames
- Bitrate: 16,548 Kbs
- [00:57:15] Reencoding: VID_00019, Pass 1 of 1
- [01:01:25] Video Encode complete
- [01:01:25] Processing audio tracks
- Track 4352 (eng): Reencoding audio to AC3...
- [01:01:31] Multiplexing M2TS
- [01:01:41] Processing: VID_00020 (10 of 10)
- [01:01:41] Extracting A/V streams [VID_00020]
- [01:01:44] Reencoding video [VID_00020]
- Source Video: MPEG-4 (AVC), 1920x1080
- Rate/Length: 29.970fps, 36 frames
- Bitrate: 500 Kbs
- [01:01:44] Reencoding: VID_00020, Pass 1 of 1
- [01:01:46] Video Encode complete
- [01:01:46] Processing audio tracks
- [01:01:46] Multiplexing M2TS
[01:01:49]PHASE ONE complete
[01:01:49]PHASE TWO - Rebuild Started
- [01:01:49] Rebuilding BD file Structure
[01:02:05] - Encode and Rebuild complete
[01:02:05] Writing BD structure to ISO file
- ImgBurn completed successfully
[01:16:08] JOB: ELTON_JOHN finished.

Anyway, on the PS3 this Disk too cycles the Sony Receiver in and out of the surround sound mode when I select the AC3 stream.

So I pulled my Samsung Blu-Ray Player (BD-C5900) and connected it to the same cables the PS3 was connected to. (HDMI to Toshiba 55SV670U and Optical to Sony STR-DE985 Receiver. That way I figured I could confirm the Disk as the source of the error.

But of course not! The Disk automatically played in the Samsung (by default) as DTS 2.0. Now that threw me so I got out the Manual, and it says a Dolby Digital Audio Stream on a Blu-Ray plays via Optical Cable on PCM as DTS 2.0. Now if I change the output stream from the Samsung to Bitstream (Re-Encode) it plays rock solid as DTS 5.1. Now if I switch to Bitstream (Audiophile) it plays on Dolby Digital / AC3 except it cycles the same (maybe worse) than it did on the PS3.

By the way, there is a note on screen to change to Bitstream (Audiophile) when you have an HDMI Receiver which has Dolby True HD and DTS-Master Audio Decoding Capability. Our Sony STR-DE985 Receiver isn't new enough to have those features, but those codecs transfer via an HDMI cable anyway as I remember...

So now before I go to bed I will try a "don't touch" on the sound streams before I hit back up. Maybe 3rd time's a charm. ;)

Wish me Luck. :cool:

[-Jim-]

jdobbs,

You probably won't believe me but I never got past this. Was there ever a manual done for BD Rebuilder Manual or user Guide? I've built a new Rig and have plenty of horsepower to crank some of our Blue Rays. I have tried (with limited success) DVDFab but I'd like something that works better. Can you assist?

[Sharc]

I imagine that with 3D and H.265 at the doorstep it might be difficult to motivate anyone for writing a manual :p