Authoring PCM and Dolby on same blu ray.

[Booshman]

I'm having some issues with athoring in Encore. I have 2 DTS-HD, 1 PCM and several dolby AC3 tracks I want to include.

Encore has the option of PCM or Dolby audio. If I use Dolby setting, encore transcodes my PCM track to a much lower bitrate dolby track, all of the audio tracks work in powerDVD. If I replace the track in tsmuxer with the PCM original, there is no sound played for the PCM track in powerDVD.

If I use PCM setting, all of the dolby tracks are converted to PCM, making the m2ts file 5gb larger than it should be. If I replace the PCM tracks with the original dolby tracks in tsmuxer, none of them have sound in powerDVD.

Is there something I can do in encore or tsmuxer to sort this out. Failing that, could something like bdedit be used to change the PCM/ dolby flag on each indvidual track so that powerDVD plays them correctly?

[jerryshadoe]

That's odd and I wish I could help you with that software, but I only really have experience with MultiAVCHD where I didn't have such problems. If no one else comes to your aid here, there is always that option

[Booshman]

With MultiAVCHD is it possible to replace audio tracks and keep the menus, or would I have to reauthor the whole thing?

[jerryshadoe]

It is possible to replace/add/delete audio tracks and, to the best of my knowledge, there is no easy way to keep the menus, but there is a way. There are more detailed instructions on what format everything has to be save in to be imported easily into MultiAVCHD on their forum, but I have little experience in importing menus from other programs, as the only ones I designed where from scratch already in the proper formats for MultiAVCHD and it was a pain to do.

If audio is your main concern, then MultiAVCHD will do you fine, but if you need a fancy menu (especially imported) then it might not be your best bet

[Booshman]

I just sorted it with multiavchd!

Basically did the same thing as I was doing with tsmuxer, but I guess that when I added the PCM track in place of the dolby track, multiavchd must do the necessary changes to the menu so it actually plays. Al my audio tracks are now the format I need, and the spiffy menus I made are in tact.

[jerryshadoe]

Glad it worked out for you

[Booshman]

Me too. I swear without Tsmuxer and MultiAVCHD, Encore is incapable of making a decent bluray.

[jerryshadoe]

The experience you describe here, I have found to be pretty common when working on any kind of audio/video/combination of the two/ kind of project. There is damn nearly no such thing, as an "all-in-one" software/app solution. We do what we can and make it work.

[Booshman]

I've found the move to bluray to be much more of a pain than using DVD. DVDLabPro could do everything I needed and any issues I had with it were a result of gaps in my own knowledge. Encore on the other hand has so many restrictions and limitations which are much lower than bluray spec, and you have to jump though hoops to get around them. For my latest disc I had to:

Replace the video with TSmuxer. (Encore always transcodes my videos that don't look as good)
Work around the menu button limit by adding more pages. (Encore limit is less than BD spec)
Replace the PCM audio with MultiAVCHD. (For reasons mentioned above)
Replace all subtitle streams with TSmuxer. (Encore doesn't read .sup files, I created a placeholder in Encore)

I seems like every time I make a disc, there's something else that needs to be sorted out before it will work the way I want.

[jerryshadoe]

I feel you on that. How I wish authoring BDs was as easy as authoring a DVD. I had it down to the point of being able to author one is about a minute with a basic menu and a few minutes for a nicer, custom menu. I miss that a lot