No success in burning my first BluRay disc

[spirit523]

I never even really got to the burn part. I have a bunch of .mkv videos on my hard drive that I would like to burn to BD-R's that are standalone bluray player playable. I have tried both ImToo bluray creator express, SoThink HD movie maker which both claim to be able to make standalone playable bluray disks from .mkv files. I suppose they first do some kind of file conversion. Ive also tried cyberlink powereditor and a few others with no success. THe first two I mentioned said that to burn a 25GB BD-R disc would take DAYS! Something like 80 hours! The other programs wouldnt even try.

Two questions: Should I first do some kind of conversion of the mkv files to ready them for burning? What is the actual format of a movie that is on a store bought bluray disc? I have also tried to convert an mkv video to m2ts but when I tried to play it back on my computer the video which was originally HD quality was now lousy quality and obviously not the same resolution as the original.

I read in another forum that one person who had the same problem as me with disc burning taking forever, had to get a new computer with an i7 cpu and 12gb of memory. That seems rather drastic. Im sure there must be people that successfully burn bd-r disks that have modest computers. I do have 2gb of memory and am running windows 7 32 bit. I have no problem authoring DVD's that are playable on standalone dvd players.

Is there a forum or a tutorial that takes a user step by step thru the process of taking a .mkv 1080p file on hard disk and doing the necessary steps to produce a playable bd-r of same video quality as the original? Also, what are some of the other software options for authoring bluray disks?

Thank you for your time.

Spirit523

[Baldrick]

Use multiavchd to convert the mkv to blu-ray/avchd. If the mkv is blu-ray compliant it will not take that long to convert. Burn with imgburn. And if it's under 7gb you can burn on a dual dvdr and it might work on your blu-ray player.

[spirit523]

Thank you, Baldrick. Guess I didnt mention, I do have an internal bluray burner. An LG BH08 model which purports to have 8x writing speed capability.

[spirit523]

Thank you again, the multiavchd program converted like a charm! I am unclear about one thing though. What file specifically do the drop into imgburn for burning to bd-r? do I drop the entire avchd folder that was created. Please advise which files are needed or is there just a batch file somewhere that was created that I need to add to imgburn to create the proper disk. Thanks again