Understanding Blu-ray

CD, DVD and (Ultra HD) Blu-ray Writers
#1

I’m experiencing a problem I don’t understand and would appreciate someone’s explanation.

I have approx 10 video clips I want to burn on to a DVD that can be played in a DVD player. These clips have been imported into a slide show so the end result when played is a main menu with 10 icons allowing the user to select which video they want to see. The problem is the 10 video clips consume 18 Gbytes of storage - much more than will fit on even a D/L DVD.

The slide show program I’m using provides the option of burning a standard DVD or a Blu-ray DVD so I decided to try the standard DVD first. Actually, to be clear, neither option actually burns the DVD. Instead, it creates an ISO file that can later be used to burn a DVD.

The ISO (standard DVD option) created fine and I could play it on my PC using CyberLink PowerDVD 10, although playing on my PC was not my goal. I then burnt the ISO file on to a blank Blu-ray disc using the Windows Disc Burner (Windows 7) which also created just fine. I could play either the ISO file or the newly created DVD on my PC (my PC has Blu-ray drives installed).

I then tried the disc in 2 separate DVD players and neither would play - giving an “Cannot read disc” error which surprised me because I didn’t think a blank Blu-ray disc knew it was a Blu-ray disc except for greater storage capacity.

Next, I recreated the ISO file this time using the Blu-ray disc option. The file size almost doubled but it did create successfully. I could not, however, play the ISO file on my PC using CyberLink PowerDVD 10 which also surprised me since both my PC drives are Blu-ray. Nonetheless, I then burnt the ISO file to a Blu-ray disk again using Windows Disc Burner - not very hopeful it would work in my player but to my surprise, it works just fine!

Would someone knowledgeable enough with Blu-ray technology please explain why option 1 (standard disc) wouldn’t play in my Blu-ray player and why (option 2 - Blu-ray disc) wouldn’t work on my PC with Blu-ray discs but would work with my DVD player?

#2

Blu ray uses a different frequency laser than is used for dvd-video. Standard dvd players simply don’t have the hardware necessary to play back a blu ray disk of any type. But now that I reread your post, I see that you have a blu ray player somewhere in there. A stand alone blu ray player is not required to recognize dvd-video on a blu ray disk.

Did you try to play the burned blu ray disk (using the Blu ray disk option) in the computer, or did you just try to play the ISO? It may be a limitation built into the software, not to play blu ray ISO files. You can try mounting the blu ray ISO in a virtual drive like Slysoft’s VirtualClone Drive and see if it will play in PowerDVD that way.

Edit: By the way, please don’t make duplicate posts in different forums. It is called crossposting and is against the rules here. It causes confusion on where to answer you.

#3

I tried playing both the Blu-ray disc created on Blu-ray media and the ISO file (using the Blu-ray disc option) set as a virtual drive. Neither would play on my PC but would play in my Blu-ray player. I watch Blu-ray movies and Blu-ray ISO files all the time on my PC.

On the flip side, why do you think the disc created as standard wouldn’t play in either of my Blu-ray players but would play on my computer?

Is the blank Blu-ray disk characterized in some way that inserting it in a Blu-ray player without a Blu-ray formatted video would be detected by the player?

#4

The stand alone player will read the disk and determine what type of disk has been inserted, whether that is a cd, dvd or blu ray disk. From that time forward, the firmware of the drive will have certain options that it can do with each type of disk. As I stated before, blu ray players are not obligated to recognize dvd-video when burned onto a blu ray disk, and so it comes up as unknown disk. The player expects blu ray video format on a blu ray disk, with UDF 2.5 file system, not dvd-video with ISO9660-UDF 1.02. The computer drive/software are not as limited apparently. I’ve never tried burning dvd-video on a BD disk.

If you have had success playing ISO files on your virtual drive previously, I’m not sure why this one failed. Marginal authoring capability of your slideshow program perhaps.

You should try burning the blu ray disks with ImgBurn by the way. I trust it far more than the built in burning capabilities in Windows. It will set the file type correctly (UDF 2.5 for blu ray video).

#5

search for multiAVCHD (for example at forum.doom9.org),
Create ACVDH-Disks at BluRay-Media with MPEG2-Content (DVD-Codec).
Did so with some episodes to get all 22 pieces onto one BR-R

#6

I tried burning the standard option to a blu-ray disk using imgburn with same results. Now I’m trying to burn the Blu-ray option using imgBurn but the file size exceeds the limit of Blu-ray SL media. I thought imgBurn had the capability to downsize to SL in such cases but I couldn’t find it in their most recent release

#7

ImgBurn is a burning engine and not a video-encoding engine.
So it has no downsize option!

To fit a BluRay above 23.500 MB onto a BD-R SL you need to reencode it.

#8

AVCHD format is very similar to blu ray, but can be burned to dvds as well as blu ray disks. Not all blu ray players can play them back however, so it isn’t a sure bet. Check the manual for your blu ray player to see if it supports AVCHD before going to the trouble of making one.

#9

Well…here’s where I’m at. The original “standard disc option” I created was about 18 Gbytes. The Blu-ray option file was almost 39 Gbytes. What I ended up doing was loading the 18 Gbyte iso file into DVDFab and writing to a standard DL disc. Quality was reduced to something like 70% but it plays both on my pc and in my Blu-ray players so I think I’ll stick with that until something else comes along.

Thanks for the help