Converting Blu-ray to AVCHD

[ma2kp]

Hi,

I'm about to buy a Blu-ray reader for my PC, and just wanted to know how I would convert a Blu-ray to AVCHD. I would like to downscale it to 720p so I may be able to fit the movie on one DVD if possible. I could only find guides on going from BD -> MKV -> AVCHD...is there any way to skip the MKV stage and go direct? Thanks!

[t0nee1]

Yes you can,however any which way you slice it,you'll have to re-encode to fit flick on standard DVD disc..
Here's one method,

https://forum.videohelp.com/topic358185.html

And some more here...
http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/646621#3916260

[jman98]

Strictly speaking, you don't HAVE to downscale to 720p. You could just reduce the bitrate. I have to warn you that according to BluRay specs 720p video needs to be at either 50 fps or 59.94 fps, which means you're going to have to do some work in AviSynth to get it to that in addition to resizing. Such is certainly possible. Do note that some very simple BluRay authoring programs may allow you to use 720p 24fps video, but my understanding is that technically this is not valid, so some BluRay players might refuse to play it.

It's not necessary to go to MKV. If you know what you are doing with AviSynth, you could use, for example, HCEnc and encode to MPEG-2. My best PC is too slow for me to encode with H.264, but you should be able to do that too if you wish, I just can't give you any suggestions on what to do if you want to go that route. H.264 can offer better compression than MPEG-2, so use that if you can. You'll get better quality than MPEG-2 at the same bit rate.

[ma2kp]

Well that's the thing, I'm a little new to this...I don't mind if I have to go through the MKV steps...I just want an end product that has a 720p video, DD audio and the subtitles. I'm also having the issue of multiple m2ts files when I ripped the Blu-ray and don't know what to do with them...

[bmo]

Well one thing I would ask about your multiple m2ts problem is are you able to play any of them and does the movie seem to be split up among your multiple m2ts files? If the answer to both questions is yes, then it would seem that all you need to do is combine the parts that make up the movie. You can do this by opening a command window in the folder containing the m2ts files and typing something along the lines of "copy /b 1.m2ts+2.m2ts+3.m2ts fullmovie.m2ts" (without quotes and where 1.m2ts, 2.m2ts, etc. are the names of your multiple files) and that should merge all the files into one big m2ts file, so hopefully you have plenty of HD space. I used this exact same method for my Black Hawk Down blu-ray which also had the multiple m2ts file problem.

As for actually converting the file to AVCHD, the guide that t0nee1 suggested looks good. But I'd also suggest this guide (https://forum.videohelp.com/topic333634.html) which uses the encoding program MeGUI. It might seem a little more complicated but it offers a lot more tweaking options if you want the best possible quality or just a quick and dirty encode. Oh and just a heads up from my experience, hopefully you know that encoding to x264 can take a really really long time on older computer hardware. To give you a general idea, my current computer has windows vista, an AMD Athlon X2 3800+@2.4 ghz, 2gb ram. A 2 hour movie will take my computer anywhere from 15-20 hours to encode at 720p resolution. I haven't attempted a 1080p encode because I do like to use my computer during the day