Blu ray authoring help

[durden]

I'm trying to back up entire seasons of some of my favourite shows on to a blu ray disc. I've tried using Sony's Architect Pro and TMPGenc Authoring Works 4. For some reason whenever I add the source files which in most cases are no bigger than a few hundred megs, they end up taking a couple of gigs on the blu ray. I don't care if the files turn out looking like dvd quality, I just want to get a good number of videos on a single disc, which was the whole reason I bought a blu ray burner.

Can anyone help me with this? Is there some setting I can change that will allow me to get more videos on a blu ray and go no lower than say dvd quality?

Thanks

[lordsmurf]

Blu-ray videos must be at certain specs to be authored. The same is true of DVD.
Random files must be re-encoded to the proper specs.

[poisondeathray]

What format were your source files ?

One option would be to burn it as a "data disc", but only your computer could play it with any certainty

But some blu-ray players have support for other formats other than blu-ray authored discs

[durden]

They are AVI files, I wanna be able to view them on my blu ray player so I can't burn them as data.

[usually_quiet]

According to its specs. TMPGEnc Authoring Works 4 re-encodes imported video to Blu-Ray compliant MPEG-2. If your source videos are in a more compressed video format, such as DivX, Xvid or h.264, they will be larger when re-encoded as MPEG-2. I couldn't find the tech specs for Sony DVD Architect Pro, but its possible that it does the same thing.

TMPGEnc Authoring Works 5 supports MPEG-4 AVC encoding as well as MPEG-2. You could download the free trial and experiment with it to find out if it can author Blu-Rays with more episodes per disc.

[poisondeathray]

They are AVI files, I wanna be able to view them on my blu ray player so I can't burn them as data.

What kind of "AVI" ? Use mediainfo if you don't know

Like xvid/AVI backups of DVD's ?

Many newer blu-ray players can play xvid/AVI as a data disc. Also other formats like mkv (h.264 compression) . If yours is like this, there will be no increase in filesize, no loss in quality if you use a data disc

If your model is older or doesn't support those features, you won't be able to fit as much (they will be re-encoded to a larger filesize and lower quality to make them compatible)

[Ai Haibara]

Which Blu-Ray player are you using? Some can indeed view AVI videos from a data disc or USB drive, as poisondeathray mentioned.

Another option might be MultiAVCHD, but I've never tried to fit a large number of videos on a single disc.

(Edit: and PDR himself beats me to restating it by a few seconds... )

[durden]

My player is an old samsung. I had no idea that blu ray burning would be this complicated. When I started making my own dvd's a few years back with convertXtodvd I could fit entire seasons of a show on one disc no problem. So I figure a disc with over 5x the storage should get more bang for my buck. But it's about the same.

[durden]

They are AVI files, I wanna be able to view them on my blu ray player so I can't burn them as data.

What kind of "AVI" ? Use mediainfo if you don't know

Like xvid/AVI backups of DVD's ?

Many newer blu-ray players can play xvid/AVI as a data disc. Also other formats like mkv (h.264 compression) . If yours is like this, there will be no increase in filesize, no loss in quality if you use a data disc

If your model is older or doesn't support those features, you won't be able to fit as much (they will be re-encoded to a larger filesize and lower quality to make them compatible)

Mediainfo says the files are MPEG-4/Xvid

[TreeTops]

"I had no idea that blu ray burning would be this complicated."

That's why a lot of us are using media players that accept a hard drive. Lots easier than trying to author a blue ray disk. But I keep trying anyway.