Blu-ray Urgh

[roxics]

I've fallen in love with collecting blu-ray movies over the last two years, just recently getting into steelbook editions. Which in my opinion every commericial blu-ray should be a steelbook release. But that is a whole other story.

I bought my first blu-ray burner last week with the intention to burn my home videos to a format that would be easy for anyone to grab off a shelf and watch. Yet still be high quality HD. Just in case I die tomorrow (because you never know). I know my non tech savvy family is never going to be able to locate MTS files from my old GH1/2 cameras in the stream folders which themselves are buried multiple subfolders deep on external drives. Even if I put MP4 files on the desktop I can't be assured they wil find them like they would an actual disc sitting on a physical shelf.

But so far blu-ray has been no walk in the park. I think Steve Jobs was right when he said blu-ray is a bag of hurt. I had hoped that by now (2014) blu-ray compatibility/support would be nearly as easy and ubiquitous as DVD. But the push away from physical media hasn't given anyone any motivation to really support this format and even worse, begin dropping support for DVD.

Where are we supposed to store all our stuff going forward?

Hard drives that sit on a shelf for a while can stop working. So that's not a solution long term. I've had too many HDDs fail on me in the last twenty years. The internet like YouTube? I've been on the internet since the late 90's and have seen countless websites go under. I don't trust websites for long term storage and the quality is generally the lowest they can get away with. Not someplace I want to be storying archives of family history.

Tape and optical discs make the most sense to me. All my DV tapes from 1999 can still be put in a camcorder and play just fine. Same is true with all the DVDs I burned early last decade. But we're losing the means to play them easily on computers as more computers are coming without optical drives and more people are turning away from set top players to streaming services and posting home videos on social networking sites that have no guarantee of being around 5-15 years from now.

I'm still betting on optical as being my best longer term solution, even if the drives get harder to find in the future. The nice thing about optical tecnology so far has been that the media has stayed the same physical size and has supported the old optical formats. Buy a blu-ray player today and you can still read CDs and DVDs with it.

All of that said, I'm having a heck of time burning actual blu-ray authored discs. I've made three discs so far and the first two came out fine for the most part. The third has sound sync issues the entire second half of the disc.

I'm having sound sync issues with Encore CS6 and my 720/60 content from my GH1. The 1080/24 content seems fine. But I'm at the point now where I'm starting to think that maybe I'm going about this wrong. That maybe rather than authoring actual blu-ray format discs, I should instead just be dropping 15-35Mbps MP4 files on blu-ray discs as data discs. I don't use menus anyway. I'm just creating long 30-120 minute video compilations with chapter markers to skip through them. My set-top blu-ray player can play a variety of formats from authored discs to MP4 and MKV files. I assume most set-top blu-ray players can and aren't just strictly blu-ray format by itself.

I'm also considering going this route because it seems like it would be easier to lay on a computer. Especially a mac where you need to buy blu-ray playing software for playing that spefiic format, versus just opening an MP4 in any video player. It would also be easier to copy the files off the disc that way.

So my question is, is anyone going this route with their video archives on blu-ray instead of authoring actual blu-ray format discs? Have you run into any set-top player issues with just MP4s on a disc? What about chapter markers? I understand MP4 as a file wrapper can support chapter markers, but from what little digging around I've done this doesn't seem to be universally supported either by players or authoring software like Premiere Pro.

 

[TheDingo]

I've had no problems at all burning blu-rays under Windows, but I don't know what's a good affordable solution for Macs. Perhaps you should try a different authoring app.

One thing I always make sure that I burn at a speed I know my hard-drives can easily keep up with. I even have a small partition on my SSD boot drive set-up specifically for high-speed blu-ray burns.

 

[Bon]

i always make data discs with mp4 files for backup every 6 months.
i use a hard drive and media player for watching.
did the same when it was just dvd.
then when my child was 8 i showed her what i was doing,so i would no longer have her or my wife asking how to play videos or how to find them.

 

[nosys70]

historically speaking, Apple rejected Blu-ray because the requirement to use blu-ray in a computer was to publish some part of the OS code and allowing foreign code to be
added in OS.
That was a no go for Apple.
Now you need to make a difference between commercial blu-ray and writable blu-ray from home.

They are technically different and there is no statistic showing the lifetime.
The only background we got is the one from DVD and DVD-R , and it is an horrible story, showing loss of data up to few weeks after bunring the media.
That said, there is nother media offering this price/quality/performance ratio , so even if far from perfect, the blu-ray is still a good solution.

If you take the problem from the data conservation point of view, there is no difference between a word document or a movie file, so the usual caution
like having several copies of the media stored at different place is always the first step to consider.
The low price of blu-ay disc and the fact that copying a disc is darn easy is no excuse here.

if you really need to get a last chance, keeping a copy of all your BD on a hardisk is also easy and cheap enough to be considered, especially if you burn some generic format (like a smartphone compatible mpeg4) in a special folder.

 

[Andrius Simutis]

The "bag of hurt" comment from Steve Jobs was regarding AACS hardware requirements for playback that Apple did not want to add. Keep in mind that Apple was also pushing iTunes as a competing delivery platform, so it's no wonder there was little love for spinning discs there. BluRay is a very robust format and when done correctly will outperform all the YouTube and Vimeo compressed videos by a wide margin.
Your audio drift is most likely because of a sample rate mismatch. Did you record your original video using 44.1khz (aka 12bit) audio? BluRay needs to be 48khz, so convert that before authoring and problem solved.
I like to bash Encore because of it's lack of BluRay spec features, but for what you're doing it should be adequate.
Burning other data formats? Maybe it'll work on your player, maybe on your Mom's player, maybe not. If you want to ensure that your video will be viewable by the most people, then stick to the universally accepted methods such as a standard video BluRay.
If you're worried about being able to watch this content years down the road, then the best strategy is to spread it out. You can have five backups on site, but if the building burns down they're all gone. Back up the originals on a drive off site, burn a couple BluRays and keep 'em separate, and load up the clips online too. Your BluRays can break down in a couple decades, but hopefully YouTube will still be around. or vice versa. That's the nature of data survival…spread your risk exposure so one disaster or change doesn't take everything.