Problems with rendering WMV files for bluray

trojanrobmc wrote on 5/6/2010, 10:00 AM

I'm trying to render about 8 hours of DVD quality video to a bluray disc in DVD Architect Pro 5.0b. The files that are being rendered are WMV files, which I believe need to be converted to MPEG2 for the bluray disc. But it seems no matter how hard I try, it only renders about 5 to 10 percent of the project, and then either hangs, just stops, or closes because of an error message (can't write the file). Is it running out of memory? Or are WMV files just problematic? I'm thinking about converting my files from WMV to MPEG2 outside of DVD Architect--is this a waste of time? Any solutions?

Thanks for the help!

Comments

musicvid10 wrote on 5/6/2010, 10:49 AM

Render your files using the appropriate BluRay video template in Vegas.
Then render your audio using the appropriate AC3 template.
Drag the rendered video into DVDA. This gets asked here a lot.

That being said, "DVD quality" WMV source is not going to produce very good BluRay video. You cannot increase quality by upsampling. And DVD contains only 1/6 the information of HD, in addition to compression artifacts.

trojanrobmc wrote on 5/6/2010, 5:29 PM

Thanks for your response. I don't really want blu-ray quality for my dvd-quality videos... I'm putting them on blu-ray just so they ALL can be on one disc. Meantime, I'm going to try to re-render the videos to MPG2 instead of WMV. It takes up more disc space, but from what i hear MPG files are easier for the PC to work with than windows media.

musicvid10 wrote on 5/6/2010, 7:14 PM

It was a little confusing at first, but I see what you are trying to do. Use BD as a data storage format because of larger capacity. Kind of redundant to convert WMV to MPEG-2 because of similar file sizes and encoding losses.

With portable drives so affordable (250GB portables around $40), dump your WMV files on one and enjoy. That's ten times the capacity of a BluRay disc.

trojanrobmc wrote on 5/10/2010, 7:19 PM

Thank you. I think the problem was with the WMV files. When I render M2T files or MP4 files, everything works.

MPM wrote on 5/11/2010, 4:28 PM

FWIW, BD accepts mpg2, AVC, or VC1 -- VC1 is wmv's kissing cousin, but while the MS winmedia sdk includes it, vc1 encoders are few & far between. Far as putting DVD vid on BD, the DVD frame sizes are BD spec, so the only prob would be it takes about 5 - 6 GB for 2 hrs of SD mpg2, so 8 hours @ 6GB each would be close. AVC is more efficient, & a better choice if you can put up with the render times. If you use the BD encoding templates in Vegas, DVDA should handle them without a re-encode, but like many (most?) BD authoring apps it has some fairly strict compliance checking -- don't use the templates & DVDA will re-encode, & since the Vegas encoding is better/faster, that's what you want. Alternatively you can use BD spec video that doesn't pass compliance checking in DVDA [or whatever authoring app] with the free TSMuxer [or tools that use it] -- lots of folks do that don't care that much about playing in every BD player out there.