Hey guys. Just thought I’d share this.
Inspired by the thread over at the DVDRebuilder subforum at doom9, I decided to try compressing a blu ray movie to fit a single layer dvd. Since I was using H264, this disk is designed to playback on a blu ray player, not a dvd player.
Ripping to the hard drive was easy using AnyDVD HD. According to jdobbs at doom9, you should inspect the files with BDedit, since some movies are apparently split into two or more m2ts files. The only two blu ray disks I have available have the entire movie on the first m2ts file, so this wasn’t a problem.
Unlike jdobbs, I’m not comfortable using command line functions for x264, so I used Ripbot264 for most of the work. Using two pass encoding and setting a hard limit on output size to 4.4gb, Ripbot has an output setting for blu ray that made this easy to set up. I kept resolution at 1920 x 1080 and did not change fps.
Some people recommend working with the audio separately using TsmuxeR to demux the audio. I had no problems converting the True HD audio to a smaller, 5.1 ac3 at 384 kbps within Ripbot.
This particular blu ray was 31gb, H264. Since I just have a dual core computer, encoding times were fairly extreme compared to what I’m used to with dvds. 16hrs to compress the movie and convert the audio. The output was a complete blu ray movie ready to burn to single layer dvd using ImgBurn in Build mode and using UDF 2.6.
The resulting copy plays well in my blu ray drive and looks great, but I don’t have a really big widescreen tv to test it on.
Final thougts…this is a chore using my current computer. A quad core cpu is going to be a necessity for encoding jobs using Blu ray as input.