suggestions for blu-ray authoring program

[poisondeathray]

I'm certain DVDA accepted >30Mb/s progressive x264 streams in the past, you can see old archived discussions about it 7-8 years ago. I know because I participated in the early testing when x264 was becoming BD compliant. Well I just tried it now in DVDA6, and I get the error too. It wouldn't surprise me if Sony "sabotaged" it on purpose for product placement purposes, since they acquired Netblender/DoStudio a few years ago. Probably don't want to cannibalize sales from their higher priced products

[SameSelf]

Thanks Sony for inserting a gotcha and not telling anyone! But that sounds like the most likely scenario.

Just as a side note, I rigorously tested DVDA, and 30 MB/s doesn't work. Neither does 29, 28.5, or even 28.2. I had to clamp to <28.

I use the command line straight from the x264 bluray webpage. I didn't know exactly what the problem was, so I simply clamped everything: bitrate, maxrate, and bufsize. But it sounds like I might be able to leave maxrate at 40K and just clamp bitrate. Need to test. It has been a while since I troubleshooted this.

Anyway, this annoys me because my masters are ProRes HQ. Plus when I have 90 minutes or less of video, that means the BD is only <75% full at <28 MB/s.

[_Al_]

did you try something like sort of simulate CBR:
--crf 10 ..blu-ray specs here ... --vbv-bufsize 35000 --vbv-maxrate 35000

not that it is a practical, but possible on optical disk,- DVDA had problem in some versions with VBR if bitrate went up and down, it did not like it, it was buffer related in some sort ...

[aedipuss]

sorry baldrick i seem to have crashed the server twice trying to post this message??? not sure what it doesn't like about it, but i'll put it inside code marks to stop taking the server down.

i use mainconcept avc 1080i60 25mbps average 40mbps max 2 pass with 4 slices.  it's never tripped the dvda error and it looks amazing.  increasing bitrate to fill space may be a bit of overkill :-)

[SameSelf]

When you say you use Mainconcept, are you talking about their standalone $500 encoder?

I suspected that was what you were doing, setting the ABR to <28 and leaving the max at 40. So thanks for confirming that. I will give that a try.

People keep calling it an error or problem, but I am not sure if that is the correct characterization. DVDA reads the .264 file just fine. However, it wants to transcode it as well which is what I assiduously try to avoid.

I didn't try any --crf flags because I was worried about triggering the transcode flag. I am not sure what the magic sauce is for --bluray-compat, so I try not to deviate too much.

I hear ya about overkill. 40 Mbps is quite generous. However, most of my video was stadium footage from the press box; it needs all the bitrate it can get.

[_Al_]

I didn't try any --crf flags because I was worried about triggering the transcode flag.

crf or 2pass , it does not matter
here is short example it could not be related at all, but as long you did lots of tests already .. they just might fixed that bug to force re-encoding ...

[aedipuss]

i've had mc standalone in the past but the difference in output from vegas pro 13 mc is not noticeable and i don't need all the other options anymore. so i've just been using vegas's mc. i agree with pdr the error/problem is probably intentional.