Blu-Ray conversion: Clueless

[searay]

Since I retired to Maryland's Lower Eastern Shore and I live on the Chesapeake bay, I have lots of family visiting during the warmer months from April to November. That means lots of night time hours when the only entertainment is TV.

I have 300+ DVD's in my collection. Mostly ripped. Most are Dual Layer. I want to start ripping Blu Ray movies as I plan to get a new 60" TV. My Old Sony 50" is finally starting to have problems but is still functioning after 10 years. I can't say enough good about this TV.

My dilema: I plan to buy a Buffalo BRXL-PC6U2B writer. I also plan to buy a 50 pack of 25G blank DVD's. Do I need to buy 50G blank DVD's? If so, where is the best (cheapest) source for reliable 50G DVD's? Does anyone have experience with the BRXL-PC6U2B? Good, bad? Will I need special software?

Any advice is sincerely appreciated.

[redwudz]

searay, in the future please use a more descriptive subject title in your posts to allow others to search for similar topics. I will change yours this time. From our rules:

Try to choose a subject that describes your topic.
Please do not use topic subjects like Help me!!! or Problems.

Thanks,
Moderator redwudz

What I use for BD storage is Verbatim BD-25 discs. JMO, but it's the only reliable BD RW disc on the market. But I only use the BD discs for archival storage after I crunch down the BD disc to something that takes up a bit less space on my HDDs. I store all my DVD and BD conversions on my hard drives. I use MKV format for my storage. Ripbot for Blu-ray and Vidcoder for DVD.

The main movie on most commercial BDs is about 20GB or less, so they may fit on a BD RW with no conversion. Depends on the quality you want to put on the BD.

50GB RW discs are still a bit expensive. Never used them.

For BD/DVD discs, check online for Meritline, Rima, and Supermediastore. They all have generally good prices.

And welcome to our forums.

[hello_hello]

I second the motion for forgetting about discs. I got so sick of burning them I don't even use them for archiving any more. I bought a few more hard drives and now store everything on two hard drives instead.

Most new TVs have built in USB media players which will play a variety of video types, although I assume you have an existing Bluray player you were planning on using? If so, does it play MKVs/MP4s and does it have a USB input? You can of course still burn the MKVs/MP4s to disc if it needs to play them that way..... but all the burning..... I was burning to Bluray discs for quite a while because they hold more than DVDs, but given they also tend to be more expensive I'm pretty sure the new hard drives effectively paid for themselves pretty quickly. Well given the amount of burning I needed to catch up on at the time and the number of discs required to do so, they were halfway to paying for themselves when I bought them. Factor in the price of the burners I now only use when I need to burn a disc for someone else...... and of course the majority of media playing devices today don't even have a disc drive... you can't stick a disc in an ipad or insert one into a smartphone.

To rip the DVDs without losing quality you might consider MakeMKV, which will remux the existing DVD/Bluray audio and video as a single MKV file. It'll do the same for DVDs you've already ripped to your hard drive. Assuming the media player displays it correctly then you're good to go unless you choose to re-encode it to reduce the file size. As I generally re-encode everything myself I'm not certain, but I think there's a chance some players mightn't display DVD/MPEG2 video inside an MKV correctly which might force you to use a different container or god forbid, burn them all as DVD video discs... and for Bluray players there's also the issue of Cinavia copy protection to consider..... but they're really not major obstacles compared to all the time you'll spend burning discs.

[jman98]

If you put everything on a disk drive, you do need to understand that they WILL die eventually. So then you have to have another disk drive to serve as an emergency backup of the main disk drive you use. Whether the disk drive dies in 2 years or 10 or more depends somewhat on random chance and somewhat on how and how much it is used.

BD-R DL discs are expensive. I've used them under rare circumstances. Verbatim makes the only ones that I trust and the only ones I ever used. Playback is a bit iffy. Most newer BluRay players will play them, but they may barf out the disc a time or two before playing without errors. Expect at least some minor playback issues that come and go if you use them.

redwudz is more optimistic than me in what he posts. Where he says:
"The main movie on most commercial BDs is about 20GB or less, so they may fit on a BD RW with no conversion."
I strongly disagree. My experience is that MOST, yes MOST, BDs have the main movie too big to fit on a single layer BD disc. For all we know one or both of us may be untypical in what we have tested, but my experience is very different from his. I will tell you that he is just flat out wrong in saying that "most" movies on commercial BDs come in at 20GB or less. Even when I've seen films that could fit on a single layer BD disc, the movie came in around 23-24 GB. The only films I've ever seen at 20GB or less on BD are some 45 minute Imax ones.

There's no such thing as "25GB DVDs" or "50GB DVDs". You mean "25GB BDs" or "50GB BDs". Please use the correct term. Any blank disc is not necessarily a "DVD". If you fail to use the correct term, it may bite you in the butt as you could go to a store and ask for "25GB DVDs" and the dumb salesguy will focus on the DVD part of what you said and happily sell you a bunch of single layer 4.5 GB DVD discs or people here will focus on the DVD part of it and give you incorrect advice.

I don't know anything about the Buffalo writer. Do be careful as single layer BD-R discs may be a special cheaper type called LTH. While most players now can play them fine, some older ones cannot. And some burners (damn you LG!) cannot burn them at all either. It will cost you more, but if you avoid LTH discs you'll have a better chance of success.

Finally we strongly recommend that you ONLY burn with the free ImgBurn program or you may end up burning coasters.

My recommendations for DVD and BD media are the same. Only use Verbatim (do avoid their Life series of DVD discs, but anything else is fine) or Taiyo Yuden (you will have to buy these online). All other brands are lower quality and may result in problems.

[fritzi93]

I still make main movie backups to single layer BDRs, since I have several standalones and viewing locations. Admittedly, they don't get used much any more since I finished our home theater. My experience is that main movie will most times fit a BD25, *if* you re-encode the audio to AC3 (Dolby Digital) 5.1 at 640 kb/s, and delete all unneeded audio and subtitle tracks.

For the home theater, I do as hello_hello suggests. My newest TV will play MKVs direct from external hard drive. It's very convenient. You can navigate to any movie using the TV's remote without handling an optical disc. You can leave your standalone player off and your HTPC as well (if you have one).

Just be sure to duplicate everything. All the movies on my externals are also stored on a couple 3 TB hard drives in my HTPC. If a hard drive fails (and it will eventually), you'll kick yourself if you don't have backups. It's a big fat pain to do a few hundred movie over again.

My TV (65" LG) ignores Cinavia, BTW, as do separate media players like the WD. So there's that as well.

I re-encode main movie with Ripbot to MKVs using constant quality encoding. BDRB is another option. Judicious re-encoding can save some space while still providing good picture quality. Try a crf of 18-20 and see what's acceptable. Skipping the encoding with MakeMKV is certainly easier though.

[Hoser Rob]

I second the motion for forgetting about discs. I got so sick of burning them I don't even use them for archiving any more. I bought a few more hard drives and now store everything on two hard drives instead...

I third (?) this. Burning them is OK, it's the encoding. Be prepared to spend as much time processing video as watching it. It's a colossal pain. Unless you have a very powerful machine you'll spend more time encoding than watching. And using a really fast machine speeds up the encoding but not the disc burning part so that remains a constant factor.

In fact, I just did 2 linux installs this last week and I didn't bother burning the .iso's to cd. I used usb thumb drives.