My wife got me a Panasonic BD-35 Blu-Ray Player for Christmas. Now begins the process of burning my Sony HDR-HC7 HD video to dvd to play on the Blu-Ray player. Sony Vegas Pro will let you do this, but I don't have it. I was looking for other commercial software to do this, but I researched this on the web and this is what I found and did. I figured some of you would appreciated the instructions as why re-invent the wheel.
Okay, here is the formula for burning a AVCHD red laser disc that my Panasonic BD-35 Blu-Ray player reads, displays, and shows. This was done with all freeware programs, except, the first step, but you could do it with freeware.
Step One
You need a separate AC3 (or AAC) audio file and a MKV video file. The first thing I did was use Sony Vegas to render my 14 minute video to Dolby Digital 5.1 AC3. This took just over a minute to render. An early test was rendering to stereo and this worked, too.
Also, an early test was converting the audio to AAC using super c, which worked, too, and is freeware. http://www.erightsoft.net/SUPER.html
Okay, you have the audio done, simple. Now, for the video.
Step Two
You need the video in MKV format. If you can render to that somehow, do so, Sony Vegas won't do that. So, I used Handbrake (just google it). I took the raw capture m2t file and
1. Opened (source) it in Handbrake
2. Set the destination output file to a name, directory, and mkv
3. Video tab - click decomb
4. Video tab - Deinterlace - slower
5. Video tab - Bit Rate 5000
6. Uncheck Advanced Encoding Setting
7. Audio tab - set to none, you already have your separate audio file, why take the time and the space? TSmuxer (below) won't read it from here, anyway.
8. Click start
My 14 minute video took four and a half hours to render. Now, I am all for a positive attitude and optimism, but I would not do a long render for a first time and hope to get lucky. I probably did about 10 trials with a minute clip until I got the process down.
Also, if someone wants to tweak these setting, please do. I just used the ones that i set for a Vimeo HD files.
Step Three
You have the mkv video file and the AC3 audio file. Now, go to this video at youtube, follow these directions, and finish this up:
Burning Blu-Ray (.MKV) to DVD
You will need TSmuxer and Image Burn, both free downloads. Tsmuxer took the mkv and AC3 files and rendered the BDMV and Certificate directories in 24 seconds. Image burn took about 3 minutes to red laser burn the directories to my regular DVD.
Step Four
Put dive video DVD in your blu-ray player and enjoy
