Please Help: Blu-ray burning for newbie

I have a new Blu-ray writer and I have Nero 8 and CyberLink BD Solution softwares and I would like to know what program I should use and step-by-step how to use it so I can back-up my blu-ray disc to a single layer BD-R 25 GB disc? Either just the movie or compressed the whole disc.

Thanks
Rene

You'll need AnyDVD HD edition to break encryption on a commercially made Blu Ray movie, and be aware that movies with the very newest edition of BD+ protection cannot be copied yet. That new protection was introduced on certain movies on Nov 11th of this year I believe.

Slysoft, the makers of AnyDVD HD, are working on a solution, but I haven't heard anything about a timeline since the first announcement earlier this month. Check with them for more info.

Once decrypted and ripped, you will see two folders in your movie file, a BDMV folder and a Certificate folder. If the movie is small enough at this point to be directly copied to a BD-R disk, you can burn with ImgBurn using the UDF 2.5 or UDF 2.6. If you want to remove sections, or have to reduce the size, move on to the next step.

Now download and open tsMuxeR. Browse to the BDMV folder, open the Stream subfolder, then look for the 00001.m2ts file and open that with tsMuxeR.

You will see a list of audio, video and subtitle streams listed in tsMuxeR. Uncheck (deselect) the parts that you do not want included. This could be foreign language subtitles or a redundant audio track. On the Output line, click on Create Blu Ray disk. Doing it this way, you may not have to reencode to fit what you want on the target disk. Default settings put a chapter point every five minutes, but this can be adjusted. The hard part is estimating output size. Once you're ready, hit Start Muxing.

Once you've created the new blu ray disk, you can burn with ImgBurn as I described before.

If you have to reencode to reduce the size of the video, look into a program called RipBot264 to work with the 00001.m2ts file from your decrypted and ripped blu ray title. You'll have to make adjustments to the encoding with H264 to fit your needed output size, and you'll have to set it to output as blu ray. Be prepared for very long encoding times...depending on the speed of your computer. A Quad core can probably do it overnight. My Core2duo takes longer.

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/tsMuxeR
http://www.imgburn.com/
http://www.videohelp.com/tools/RipBot264

---

Last edited by Kerry56; 01-12-2008 at 00:06.

After a brief examination, RipBot264 might not have enough fine control to compress the movie just a small amount. The largest bitrate I could find in it was only 8k or so. As an alternative, in case you need to reencode, you might try MeGui, using X264 codec and output in an mkv container. Then reauthor to blu ray using tsMuxeR or your Cyberlink software.

Thank you,
This means that Nero 8 and Cyberlink do not compress the Blu-ray disc at all. I will try it over the weekend.
Do have a lot of lose in quality?
Thanks

I do not have Nero 8 or the Cyberlink BD software, so I cannot tell you their capabilities. I simply mentioned the tools I know for this process.

H264 is amazingly good at compression, so I doubt you'll notice anything going down a slight amount in size. Many people are compressing all the way to single or dual layer dvds instead of the costly BD-R or BD-RE disks, and the quality is still good at those levels.

By the way, most of what I described is for a "movie only" backup. I'm not aware of a true, "complete" backup software solution if compression is necessary, though I understand jdobbs is working on a version of DVDRebuilder for Blu Ray. There very well may be one out there somewhere that I don't know of.

Mr. Kerry, I have ripped I am legend as a iso file. The movie is 37 gigs. I opened the tsMuxeR and located file 00001.m2ts and opened it. I see 6 different audio files. Is there any way to sample which is english? Also if I convert to blu ray option and create ouput folder do I just replace the previous file with the new one created? and do you feel that most movies on blu ray exceed 25 gig disc so if my only goal is to burn...should I wait until 50 gig disc come down in price?

I'm not sure I got all that, I'm a little slow I guess but that was very informative Kerry 56 Thank you for a great post.

@Joshdip
TsMuxeR normally shows the language of the audio streams as an abbreviation in the main window of the program once you open the m2ts file. eng for English, fra for French, etc. If you don't see that, you can hit Demux instead of Create Blu Ray Disk, select only one of the audio streams and test it for language separately. But normally the True HD audio stream is in English for an English language film.

When you create a new blu ray movie, it is a different file than the one you've ripped to the hard drive...it doesn't delete or replace the existing one. But I always put the new movie in a different spot on the hard drive anyway...you can select location for the output. Hope that is what you were asking.

Output size varies too much on the main movie plus one audio track for me to predict. 25gb disk may or may not hold it.

and to Master Zaric...be sure to include my addendum to that post. I don't think Ripbot264 will work for incremental backups to a blu ray disk...it works well going to dvds, either single or dual layer. Oh, and use UDF 2.5 in ImgBurn...that is what the author recommends.

I click tru hd and out put to a new folder, I clicked create blu ray under each category file, The output folder said all of the same files were there, but the properties were only 556,00kb. I would never waste a blu ray disc trying that out. It was ridiculous considering there were 3 20 gig mts files.

Joshdip
You said you wanted a way to test whether the audio files were in English. What I suggested was to unselect EVERYTHING except the one audio stream you wanted to test. Click on DEMUX rather than CREATE BLU RAY....select an output folder then start.

This will give you the audio stream in its original format. TEST it using VLC. The only reason to do any of this is to see if the audio is the one you want to include. Once you find out, delete this copy. None of this should be necessary however if the audio streams have the language abbreviation included next to them in tsMuxeR.

At this point, once you have determined which audio stream you want, you can click on Create Blu Ray disk, pick the audio AND video stream and start the process of making a new Blu Ray disk with only those streams that you have selected included.

And since I'm still discovering tools for Blu Ray, you might want to look at this one I've just downloaded for examining content on blu ray disks. It works for ripped files too...at least the ones I have.

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/BDInfo

It shows language of audio files.

Wow this all so great. I want to thank you since this is what I want to do. I just got the new Dark Knight blu-ray disc and I would love to back it up since I'm going to be taking it everywhere trying to convince family members that blu-ray is great. I'm still contemplating buying a bluray burner since I'm not sure how much work goes into backing up movies. I don't mind buying the 50gb blu-ray disc media as I would like to have a complete back up but I don't think that's possible yet. If you do know of how I can remove the protection and just make a copy of the whole 50 gigs I would like to know. Thanks in advance for any help.

naztihex
It is possible to make a complete backup of your blu ray disk, but it would be expensive. You would have to have a blu ray burner, a 50gb disk and AnyDVD HD.

You can buy 50gb BD-R or BD-RE disks at rima.com They are $32 and $39 respectively (Sony brand) plus shipping.

Rip to the hard drive as an ISO using AnyDVD HD's built in ripper. Then use ImgBurn in UDF 2.5 to burn to the disk.

I won't be doing this anytime soon, as the media prices are just too high. For me, it makes more sense to copy to the hard drive as ISO files, then mount them in a virtual drive and play them from the computer. Not everyone wants to have an HTPC though.