Very likely the wrong sub-forum, but...

S

Sagan

Active member
I recently bought 50 so-called Verbatim BluRay disks, intending to burn some HD content to them and distribute them family-wise.

On the packaging it says 23 GB, and in the "info" panel on my Mac it also says 23 GB.

However, every time I try to burn a movie to a disk I get an alert to say that the "duration" is too short, (or long), I forget which, and I can't continue. Apparently the disks do not have the capacity they claim to have. One thing I noticed is that there is a clear "ring" about an inch in from the middle hole, which can be seen through. Very strange.

Question: is there any way to establish for sure what the capacity of the disks is? Or do I just have a bunch of knock-offs, not worth a bean?

Thanks.
 
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Blu-Rays, like DVDs, came in both single and dual layer variety.

It may be that you are trying to burn something designed for a dual-layer disc (capacity 40+GB) onto a single layer disc.

Having a plastic ring in the middle is normal as far as I remember. CDs and DVDs certainly do, I don't see any reason for Blu-Rays to be different.
 
I would first update the firmware for your Blu-Ray burner. Also update any drivers.

I have read before of people having burn issues related to file names that are too long. You might research that.

If you could give us the exact wording of the error message you get, that would help.
 
Are you burning this as a blu-ray data disc or as a blu-ray video disc ?

I've burned close to a hundred blu-ray data discs by now and they do store 23 GB of data. These are made to be read by a computer or certain blu-ray players that will recognise MP4 files when burned to a data disc.
 
TheDingo said:
Are you burning this as a blu-ray data disc or as a blu-ray video disc ?

I've burned close to a hundred blu-ray data discs by now and they do store 23 GB of data. These are made to be read by a computer or certain blu-ray players that will recognise MP4 files when burned to a data disc.
Click to expand...

He says he's trying to burn a movie to the discs, so I assume he's burning Blu-Ray video, not data. Could be wrong, though.
 
The plastic ring that I mentioned is actually a circle of transparency, about 2mm wide, and about a quarter-inch in from the middle hole. Not the clear middle part that all digital disks have.

On the packaging it says 23-something GB, and when I put one in the drive, and bring up the "info" panel, it also says 23-something GB.

David, initially I was trying to burn a movie file that was, in fact, too large for a disk. But then to test it, I edited that file so its size was about half the disk's capacity. But it still didn't work.
 
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The file name was about five characters long.

I'll try updating the drivers, and meanwhile do it again to get the exact message.
 
TheDingo said:
Are you burning this as a blu-ray data disc or as a blu-ray video disc ?

I've burned close to a hundred blu-ray data discs by now and they do store 23 GB of data. These are made to be read by a computer or certain blu-ray players that will recognise MP4 files when burned to a data disc.
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Burning a video disk, Dingo.

I did try to burn a few small files of plain data to a disk, but got the same message.
 
Sagan said:
Ah well, put it down to experience. Couldn't get the !! things to work.
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Have you at least tried to burn a disc from a different manufacturer? If you can get it to work with most other discs, it's possible that there's some strange compatibility issue between your burner and that one brand. How about a disc from a different batch? It's even more likely that you bought a spindle of discs from a faulty manufacturing run.
 
Alex H. said:
Have you at least tried to burn a disc from a different manufacturer? If you can get it to work with most other discs, it's possible that there's some strange compatibility issue between your burner and that one brand. How about a disc from a different batch? It's even more likely that you bought a spindle of discs from a faulty manufacturing run.
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Yes, for sure, Alex. I've made many many blu-ray disks using my current burner.

In any case, whatever the problem is, I'll be returning the disks. No sense flogging a dead horse.

I only bought them because blu ray media seems to be becoming very hard to get. Thought I'd stock up. But it seems that blu ray media may be on the way out. The alternative is putting movies on external hard drives, to play through the USB port on the television. But there's a problem with that, too.

I've just spent the past week or more trying to put a movie made in FCP10 on to an external drive. Should be simple, and mechanically it is. But the TV has to recognise your codecs, and therein lies the problem.

I shared a movie from FCP10 as a Master File, the size of which was a massive 600+ Gb. So far, I've run it through FCP10 itself, Compressor, MPEG Streamclip, and Quicktime Pro, trying to get a result that'll play on my Samsung HDTV. I've managed to get fair quality video with no sound, garbage video with sound, and reasonably good video with sound. But I cannot get top quality video, no matter which way I compress it.

I suppose this is a topic for a different forum.
 
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Sagan said:
I shared a movie from FCP10 as a Master File, the size of which was a massive 600+ Gb. So far, I've run it through FCP10 itself, Compressor, MPEG Streamclip, and Quicktime Pro, trying to get a result that'll play on my Samsung HDTV. I've managed to get fair quality video with no sound, garbage video with sound, and reasonably good video with sound. But I cannot get top quality video, no matter which way I compress it.
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Good lord! 600 GB????

Are you able to get that movie burned onto any other brand of Blu-Ray disc now??? If it's just those particular discs that you can't burn this file to, then yeah -- pitch the discs. But if now you find you cannot burn this file to other brands of discs either, then it could be either the file is just too big, or the file may be corrupt, or your burner might be failing.

It doesn't matter if you've burned a million Blu-Rays in the past -- your burner could be failing now. So I'd want to know a couple of things. Can you burn a smaller -- much smaller -- file to these discs without a problem? Then, can you burn the master file created from this 600GB movie successfully to some other brand of discs? Also, what is the running time of this 600GB movie?
 
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David W. Richardson said:
Good lord! 600 GB????

Are you able to get that movie burned onto any other brand of Blu-Ray disc now??? If it's just those particular discs that you can't burn this file to, then yeah -- pitch the discs. But if now you find you cannot burn this file to other brands of discs either, then it could be either the file is just too big, or the file may be corrupt, or your burner might be failing.

It doesn't matter if you've burned a million Blu-Rays in the past -- your burner could be failing now. So I'd want to know a couple of things. Can you burn a smaller -- much smaller -- file to these discs without a problem? Then, can you burn the master file created from this 600GB movie successfully to some other brand of discs? Also, what is the running time of this 600GB movie?
Click to expand...

I should clarify, David, that I'm not trying to burn that file to one of the BluRay disks I was having trouble with. This is now a different problem I'm talking about. I'm trying to burn that file to an external hard drive. Sorry, I was confusing, I know.

The video is two and a half hours of a stage musical, filmed with a GH4 at 1920x1080 at 100MBPS. I wanted to do it in 4K but I would have needed a truck to carry the files home! Anyway, after editing, (minimally), I "shared" it as a Master File via ProRes to the Desktop. I planned to try various routes to then get it down to a reasonable size for storing on an external hard drive, and play it though the USB port on my TV.

Well, nothing worked. As I said, I tried QT, FCPx, Streamclip, Compressor, using each of the many settings in each application. Some of the burns took almost all day. In every attempt, I could not get a video that was playable on the TV. Always got the message "Codec is not supported". I know the required codec of a Samsung TV, but not one of my applications was able to create a file to the correct specs.

EDIT: I did get one burn to work, and it played on the TV, but the resolution was ridiculously bad, almost like a VHS recording, and it had no audio. Turns out the file size had been reduced to about 2G, so something went badly wrong there! At the resolution I'm trying to compress it to, it should still a very big file, (about 85Gb), so I'd expect at least BluRay quality.

It's taken me over a week, and frankly I've abandoned it. It's ridiculous.

But if you or anyone else can suggest a workflow that will let me create the video I want, I'll try try try again. :)

.
 
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