Worth it to re-author SD video from miniDV source to Blu-Ray?

[jg0001]

See topic. The idea is thus -- the original source video I have on miniDV tapes (from an SD camera) is of a higher bit-rate than DVD can make use of; in the olden days, I'd get the video off the tape with Scenalyzer (making .AVI files on my HDD, which I kept) and then use CCE to convert those files to DVD-spec'd MPEG2 files at 8K contant bit-rate for DVD authoring. There was always a small, yet noticeable degradation in picture quality from the original data to the compressed MPEG2.

Is it possible to go back to my original AVI source files, convert them to a Blu-Ray compliant video specification, still in SD resolution, but making better use of the original bit-rate? If so, what codec should I use? One of the nice things about this would be the ability to get more of my original video onto a single disc (thinking 25GB BD-Rs). I haven't tried it, but would a DV-AVI file work without any re-encoding in a standalone Blu-Ray player (or perhaps PS3?)

Any special things to watch out for in this process? I do know that when I play the DV-AVI files directly on my PC (in VLC or MPC) I often have to manually fix the aspect ratio as it is a touch off (is that due to a non-square pixel assumption?). Thanks in advance.

[I already have a BR burner, and my PCs are running Win7 on Quad core CPUs, with 8GB of ram and a ton of HDD space. I have a preference for free utilities and don't intend to do much, if any, editing of the video. I just want it 'on there'.]

[MOVIEGEEK]

DV-AVI will always look better as is compared to converting them to MPEG-2. One reason is DV is 4:1:1 and MPEG-2 is 4:2:0, another reason is MPEG-2 is lossy. Anytime you convert to a lossy format you will lose info, since you already have a high quality copy I would just use MPEG-2 with multiAVCHD.

[jg0001]

Are you suggesting I just use the MPEG2 files as is (i.e. DVD spec files)?

[MOVIEGEEK]

You could use the DV-AVI's and convert them to MPEG-4(AVC) but it will take a long time to convert and the improvement is negligible.

[edDV]

Is it possible to go back to my original AVI source files, convert them to a Blu-Ray compliant video specification, still in SD resolution, but making better use of the original bit-rate? If so, what codec should I use? One of the nice things about this would be the ability to get more of my original video onto a single disc (thinking 25GB BD-Rs). I haven't tried it, but would a DV-AVI file work without any re-encoding in a standalone Blu-Ray player (or perhaps PS3?)

With BluRray it is possible to encode MPeg2 720x480i SD at higher than 10Mb/s but I haven't tested players at those bit rates. If you go to all I frame MPeg2 at say 25 Mb/s there is little difference vs. DV-AVI other than color space conversion from 4:1:1 to 4:2:0. While most Blu-Ray players won't play DV-AVI directly, they will play MPeg2.

There are programs that rescale 4:1:1 DV to uncompressed 4:2:2 or 4:4:4 (interpolated pixels) for production purposes but to my knowledge Blu-Ray only supports 4:2:0 for MPeg2.

The best supported Blu-Ray alternate format at this time is interlace VC-1. It will allow interlace at near 8 bit Digi-Beta quality at 20 Mb/s. Bit rates of 10 or 20 Mb/s can be used for 720x480.

I'm considering a VC-1 conversion of my best of DV-AVI archive for Blu-Ray or media players but I'm in no hurry. Interlace h.264 is advancing and may be a future contender. At some point media players may advance to play DV-AVI directly saving all the recode effort. For now I'm happy with my ~9Mb/s MPeg2 collection.

Any special things to watch out for in this process? I do know that when I play the DV-AVI files directly on my PC (in VLC or MPC) I often have to manually fix the aspect ratio as it is a touch off (is that due to a non-square pixel assumption?).

VLC will default to square pixels so it shows NTSC DV-AVI 12% wide stretched but if you specify 4x3 aspect in video settings, VLC will play DV-AVI at correct aspect ratio. The Yadif deinterlace setting also does good on the fly playback deinterlace.

[DVDLogic]

Hi!

You can try to use this simple tool for DVD to BD conversion:
http://dvd2bd.com/dvdtobdexpress.html

This is very simple in use one button program.
All you need to do is to set the input and output paths, and then you will have analogous to source DVD but with valuable BD structure on the output.

Full options version is available for Sonic Scenarist BD.
http://dvd2bd.com

Valery.