Blu-rays: Burning to the edge?

[DoctorM]

I know with DVDs it's always considered a good idea to try not to burn to 100% capacity. Most people citing around about 4.35gb as really the limit.

IIRC that was because the outer edges of the discs tended to be of poorer quality from the manufacturing process.

Does this apply to BD's as well? I know the hard limit is 23866mb, but is there a safe maximum or am I fine as long as it fits?

[laserfan]

IIRC that was because the outer edges of the discs tended to be of poorer quality from the manufacturing process.

I don't know about that, but what is more likely the case is that at the outer edge of the disc both Writers and Readers become more susceptible to any small errors in e.g. hole placement (with resulting rotational anomalies). So maybe the disc will burn & verify on the drive you made it with, but "who knows" whether others will be able to deal with wobble.

I haven't seen a lot of discs with edge damage, but I suppose that is another thing to worry about (dropping).

[Ghitulescu]

So far the BD manufacture was a closed club, with high prices and high quality. As the DVD 10 years ago.
Once the budget mfgs will enter the game, probably the quality will drop. As with DVD and CD before it.
Nevertheless, the BD burning is even today much lower than had the DVD in the corresponding pahse

[Groucho2004]

Does this apply to BD's as well? I know the hard limit is 23866mb, but is there a safe maximum or am I fine as long as it fits?
There are plenty of opinions about this around but I haven't found any hard data. So, I just use common sense, burn my BDs to 98% of their maximum capacity (23400MB) and avoid headaches. My quality scans support this approach.

[rik1138]

I've burned both single layer and dual layer BD-Rs to within less than 10mb of their max limit, and haven't had any problems. I don't do that very often, mind you, as it can be difficult to get such a precise size out of a mux, but I've done it. (It was more an 'accident' that it was so full than any skill in the bit-budgeting process...)

I've even replicated a dual-layer disc that was 50,042,xxx,xxx in size (50,050,629,632 being the exact maximum amount of space on a dual later disc, so within ~8mb of the max size. A single-layer disc is exactly half that.) Setting the layer-break was a b*tch though, I'd recommend against trying it on dual layer for that reason alone... :) )

I had never seen a reason to avoid doing it on DVD either. It was a different issue with replication, as applying the CSS encryption actually used some of your disc space (not the case with Blu-ray though), so you had to be careful not to completely max it out with your data if you wanted to encrypt the disc. And there's always a little overhead when muxing, if your source video and audio files are the exact size of the disc layer, when muxed they won't fit. But if your ISO or layout folder is under the numbers mentioned above, they'll burn fine.

I tend to leave a GB or so free though just out of principle as we frequently have clients that will suddenly want to add a logo, trailer, longer menu loop, any number of stupid things, so it's best to play it a little safe if you are doing work for someone else.

[Ghitulescu]

Replication is a completely different story :)

[dukey]

I know in the good old days you could actually overburn CDs, ie get more than 700meg on them.

[DoctorM]

I know in the good old days you could actually overburn CDs, ie get more than 700meg on them.

Yup. I almost forgot about that.

All: The current project in question is 24,927,480,086 bytes. That's 98.9% full and I was starting to get skittish about it.
I also don't relish the re-encoding that would be required to lower it 1%.

[rik1138]

Replication is a completely different story :)

True, but every title I've replicated (on DVD or Blu-ray) has been burned to DVD-R/BD-R(E) first for QC purposes, and played in it's entirety on multiple players. For Blu-ray at least, there's no difference in final file size for BD-R or replication.

Yup. I almost forgot about that.

All: The current project in question is 24,927,480,086 bytes. That's 98.9% full and I was starting to get skittish about it.
I also don't relish the re-encoding that would be required to lower it 1%.

Should burn fine. That's still over 90mb of unused space, I've successfully burned larger images than that. :)

If you happen to have a BD-RE, you can always test-burn it first.