Blue Ray burning without BD burner?

[Ed Kukla]

I have a MBP with Premiere CS4 & Media Encoder. Can I burn a Blue Ray disc with my DVD burner in the MBP? This would only be 3 to 5 minute videos originated on HD.

[Mikel Arturo]

You can EMULATE a Bluray, recorded on a DVD disc.
You can record 15-20 minutes on a single layer DVD.
30-40 minutes on a dual layer DVD.
I don't rembember if Adobe Encore can do this, but Corel Videostudio X2 and now X3 can record Bluray material on DVD disc.
In theory, most bluray players can play this disc.
In theory, YOU CAN'T DO MENUS (or complex menus). Only video.

Hmm, also you can try with Nero Burning, Toast or similar.

[Chris Hurd]

You can burn a short program as Blu-Ray to a standard DVD using Toast.

There's an article somewhere with the step by step, I'll try to find it.

[Chris Hurd]

This is from Bruce Nazzarian, he shows you how to record a short
Blu-Ray program to DVD-R which will play in any Blu-Ray deck,
using Toast 10 for Mac (also works with Toast 9 as well).

TheDigitalGuy.com - Toast 10 Vid Tutorial #3: A Quick Auto-Play movie

Not sure if CS4 can do this. Toast from Roxio is about $80.

Hope this helps,

[Randall Leong]

Ed,

The only way that you can do HD videos through Encore on anything but full-blown Blu-ray blanks and a full-blown Blu-ray burner would be to write the video as a Blu-ray folder instead of burning directly to disc, and then you will need a separate burning program such as the freeware IMGBurn to write to disk. Encore by itself will not let you write high-definition video content directly onto disc if you don't have a full-blown Blu-ray burner.

[Richard Lucas]

Actually, there's a workaround. Burn an image file (.iso) out of Encore. Then use IMGBurn to burn the image to a DVD.

Now, not all BD players want to play HD content from a DVD. I had a Samsung that would start playing okay but shortly get glitchy and ultimately stop. I'm guessing it was a data rate issue from the DVD.

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Richard Lucas

Actually, there's a workaround. Burn an image file (.iso) out of Encore. Then use IMGBurn to burn the image to a DVD.

I tried this - and it didn't work properly with my setup. IMGBurn did burn the image onto DVD - but then, none of the standalone BD players I tried the result on could read the disk or play it back correctly. You see, AVCHD DVDs differ slightly in structure from regular BDs. Plus, the index files from the ISO only work if the result is burnt onto a full-blown BD-R using a BD burner. This is why I burned the disc as a BD folder.

One final note:

Before you can burn the HD video onto DVD, you have to make sure that the average total bitrate (this means video, audio and miscellaneous tracks combined) of that video to be burnt onto DVD does not exceed 18 Mbps. Otherwise, you may get choppy playback.

[Robert Young]

A big issue with BR on DVD is data rate.
I haven't done this for a while, but my recollection is that 16-18 mbs is the max that a DVD will handle.
If you use 25-30 mbs, you can burn it to disk, but it won't play.
I also used the free ImgBurn to burn the DVD from the Encore produced image file.
It definitely does work, and looks pretty good, even with the lower data rate.

[Ed Kukla]

sounds like it's not worth the hassle, I'll buy a BD burner

thanks all

[Robert Young]

Hey...
You're going to end up there anyway, so why waste the time :)