Encoding SD NTSC to Blu-Ray compliant format

[bigass]

A VHS conversion client wants a copy he can play in his Blu-Ray player in addition to the digital deliverables.

I've got all the tapes captured, processed and ready to rock at 704x480 interlaced, currently in MagicYUV 422. I also have some DVD-sourced MPeg2 and MiniDV-sourced AVIs.

In doing some reading of threads here, doom9, etc. from the past 10+ years, I'm not clear on what's today's best option for putting all this on a playable Blu-Ray. The dude says his machine has scoffed at some pro-burned stuff before, so I'm aiming for more compliance than dropping some video files on a BD-ROM, unless that itself is a reliable delivery method. I dunno. I've burned very few BR-R over the years.

My questions, if I may ...

- Is 704x480 legal for Blu-Ray? I've seen some yes, some no. If I have to pad things out, fine, bah, fine.
- I've seen some say Blu-Ray is OK with Mpeg2 files that are DVD compliant. I've seen others explaining that the Blu-Ray standard is full of sticking points that, if missed, break compliance.
- Mpeg2 or AVC? I see the "h264 sucks for interlaced" myth debunked in posts a decade old, so I'm torn.
- I'd love love love it if the solution has an easy GUI with a "make this Blu-Ray Okay!" button, but the "most likely candidate to work (but hasn't yet)" is x264.exe with a very long command line. Some middle ground?
- Recommended course of action? I have a crap-ton of tools to work with but have succumbed to paralysis by analysis.

Thank you, gang.
'
Oh, and the x264 command line that choked on the source was:

x264 --bitrate 9000 --preset veryslow --tune film --bluray-compat --vbv-maxrate 40000 --vbv-bufsize 30000 --level 4.1 --keyint 30 --open-gop --slices 4 --bff --colorprim "smpte170m" --transfer "smpte170m" --colormatrix "smpte170m" --sar 10:11 --pass 1 -o out.264 "kris-01-vhs-memories-raw-to encode"

[manono]

Just read What Is Blu-Ray.

720x480 MPEG2 is okay, 704x480 is not. I'd suggest making one as a test and sending it to the client to test.

[Sharc]

You may want to import your videofiles in BD-Rebuilder and let it do the job. It will convert the files as neccessary and produce blu-ray compliant outputs, format and file structure-wise, including a basic menu if desired.
https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=143716
Be prepared for a certain learning curve though.

Edit:
If you want to proceed manually, here an overview of blu-ray compliant AVC (x264) video formats:
http://web.archive.org/web/20210620231325/https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=154533
Keep in mind that audio has to be compliant as well.

[bigass]

Thanks, all, for the valuable feedback. The main article linked in "what is Blu-Ray" outlines a whole bunch of allowable sizes, 704x480 among them, but that was for a particular use case among all the different sorts of streams, so I bet you're correct.

After looking at the options, I went with old standby TMPGENC and its Authoring Works program. It read the MagicYUV AVIs just fine and did a painless job of transcoding. Faster than I expected, too, considering I'm making two discs of 20+GB. The menus are cheese, but as long as they work, I'm not going to complain.