HELP with Sony DVDArch5 & burning a menu-based Blu-ray... successfully

[jimcornetet]

ok.... just burned my very first blu-ray disc using dvdarch5 and went to play it in my home-theater blu-ray player and got "UNKNOWN DISC"

New Technology 1
Jim 0

is there ANY step-by-step guide to making a successful menu-based blu-ray thru DVD Arch5 out there on the internet?

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here is what i did....if you see a mistake please point it out to me:

> source video from sony fx7 hdv - 1hr50min high school musical
> rendered the video in vegas9 using the "blu-ray 1440x1080-60i 25Mbps" template
> rendered the audio in vegas9 using the "AC3 dolby digital 5.1 surround template"
> made a title screen in dvdarch pro 5 with a link saying "PLAY MOVIE" that links into the 1hr50min high school musical
> checked properties within dvdarch so it targeted a 25gb BD-R at 1440x1080 60i with ac3 5.1 audio
> i prepared the blu-ray and the 1hr50min play didnt need re-rendering but the title screen did. it finished and the final project was put into a folder with a BLURAY.ISO file type.

BLURAY.ISO = 24,123,488kb

> i then inserted my blank 25GB BD-R and burned the BLURAY.ISO file thru dvdarch5 using the "burn" option since i had already used the PREPARE

Bluray Disc = a sample disc that came with the Pioneer burner. Mfgr is Optical Quantum, BD-R 4x 25GB Single Layer

> it burned the disc and ejected in 36mins saying the burn was successful. upon playing it in my blu-ray player i get UNKNOWN DISC
> putting it back into my computer's bluray burner, i explored to it and the disc isnt even recognized as though there was no disc in there. it seems like it didnt "finalize" or something to that effect.
> so know i'm left with this BLURAY.ISO on my computer and NO IDEA what to do with it.....

the most interesting thing is when looking at the burn-pattern on the disc, it only filled-up 3/4th of the disc space. i would think 24,123,488kb worth of data would have a burn pattern almost to the outer edge.

[racer-x]

Try burning the ISO image with IMGBurn instead. It's free and does a very good job. Ive made many Blu-Ray disk using DVDA to author, but always burned with IMGBurn and never with DVDA..........

[jimcornetet]

got the same exact answer on a sony vegas board. so it must be the correct path to take... THX!

[mikiem]

FWIW, DVDA won't let you output non-spec BD audio or video -- it'll just encode anything it doesn't like -- so how/where you encoded them shouldn't have any effect on whether a DVDA BD disc plays or not. If you want to check your ISO 1st & save risking a BD blank, you can try mounting the image -- you may need to research on how to get your software player to read a mounted ISO -- or you can burn a BD rewritable. I have had good luck burning from DVDA 5 using my LG burner -- tried it just to see if it worked -- but like most people prefer ImgBurn... in XP Pro SP3 32 I also had to install the Windows' updates to get the OS to recognize the BD UDF format.

[racer-x]

Another crazy DVDA 5 bug is if you are running a 64-bit version of windows and have a BD burner or BD-ROM installed in your PC. AS soon as you hit the "Make Blu-Ray Disk" button, you will get a nasty BSOD crash and your PC will reboot. To get around this nasty bug, you can dis-able your BD drive in "Device Manager", compile your BD using "Create ISO", then re-enable your BD burner and burn the image with IMGBurn.

It's ridicules, I know, but it's just one of those typical sony bugs that they are in no hurry to fix............

P.S. this only applies to 64-bit windows, not 32-bit versions.