BD Authoring Software

[FrankT]

I don't think Encore is being updated anymore anyway, not from what I heard.

[Booshman]

I have to try out that trick as well - thanks, Booshman!

Encore also drove me nuts many times, but it still seems to be the only tool for me that I can design menus with the way I want them to be. But unfortunately it's not possible to put Dolby Digital / DTS and PCM together on a disc (you always have to decide) and I never got DTS-HD to work. But with that workaround I could finally put any audio I want onto the discs and just have to insert Dummy-audio in Encore. Been looking for such a solution for a long time, now it finally seems to be there.

I got around the issue of DD/PCM being on the same disc by replacing the stream with mutiavchd. The thred about that is here:

https://fanrestore.com/thread-1185.html

Here's another page with a different workflow to do it also:

https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=175551

[Dr. Cooper]

I'll definitely try this out next time I'm authoring a Blu-ray in Encore.

As for Encore: It's not developed anymore, maybe they recognized how many bugs this tool had and finally gave up on it. I've never worked with another tool as buggy as Encore...
To get it with the CC you have to download the old Premiere CS6 and Encore CS6 will be installed automatically as well, but there's no Encore CC available.

[Dr. Cooper]

Have to dig this thread up again since I'm currently working on a Blu-ray-authoring:
Unfortunately Encore is limited to 8 audio-tracks, but I'd like to add 10 tracks to my disc. Is there also a way to get around this (a link for each track shall be included in the main- and the popup-menu) or do I need to reduce it to 8 tracks?

And another question which might be stupid: Do I also need to add 8 (or 10 if it works) tracks for assets which actually only have one audio-track or will it get confused then if another track (let's say track 4) is chosen in the main-menu? On retail-discs some videos have just 1, others have several audio-tracks and it works fine, but I don't know how Encore reacts to this.

[Booshman]

Have to dig this thread up again since I'm currently working on a Blu-ray-authoring:
Unfortunately Encore is limited to 8 audio-tracks, but I'd like to add 10 tracks to my disc. Is there also a way to get around this (a link for each track shall be included in the main- and the popup-menu) or do I need to reduce it to 8 tracks?

And another question which might be stupid: Do I also need to add 8 (or 10 if it works) tracks for assets which actually only have one audio-track or will it get confused then if another track (let's say track 4) is chosen in the main-menu? On retail-discs some videos have just 1, others have several audio-tracks and it works fine, but I don't know how Encore reacts to this.

Probably a bit late to respond to this. I think you can go over the asset limit for encore as long as it's within bluray spec. So you could add more audio tracks to the disc later, after the disc was created, but there would be no button to access them in menu, you would need to do it with the remote.

I'm not sure I understood the second question.

[Dr. Cooper]

Thanks for the reply!
So audio-track 9 and onwards would be "hidden features".

I already found the answer to the second question myself. What I was wondering about was the following:

The main-title has e.g. the following audio options:
1. German
2. English
3. French
4. Spanish

And then there's a bonus-feature on the same disc, but it only has one audio-track. What's going to happen, when I select "French" (track 3) in the menu for audio-setup and then try to play the bonus-feature which only has one audio-track. I thought it might lead to confusion, because the link might be set so the player starts looking for track 3 on all assets. But I found out that's not the case, you can just add more tracks to the main-feature and the bonus-features still play fine even if they have less tracks.

[Booshman]

Thanks for the reply!
So audio-track 9 and onwards would be "hidden features".

I already found the answer to the second question myself. What I was wondering about was the following:

The main-title has e.g. the following audio options:
1. German
2. English
3. French
4. Spanish

And then there's a bonus-feature on the same disc, but it only has one audio-track. What's going to happen, when I select "French" (track 3) in the menu for audio-setup and then try to play the bonus-feature which only has one audio-track. I thought it might lead to confusion, because the link might be set so the player starts looking for track 3 on all assets. But I found out that's not the case, you can just add more tracks to the main-feature and the bonus-features still play fine even if they have less tracks.

Ah, I see what you were trying to do now, well glad you found the answer. For the first issue, I had the same problem on my Superman 3 disc, so I added a note to the menu in the audio section to say more options were available via the remote control.

[monks19]

Hello all. Sorry I'm late to the party. Any of you attempted to use Sony/Magix DVDArchitect ? It does have some limitations compared to Encore (for exemple, the lack of better menu making for the Blu-Ray authoring), but it does have some nice options that Encore didn't have (like the "Multi Angle" function for any alternate views), and as far as I know, doesn't have any limitations to the number audio tracks you can add (the same for the subtitles).

However, you can't do any seemless branching with it.

If any of you want to have try, have fun. It's an alternative to both Encore and Scenarist BD (which I did abbandon any hope of learning).

[Dr. Cooper]

Have to dig this thread up again: Swapping audio- and video-tracks works fine for me now. I'm using shitty proxy-encodes for Encore and swap them for the better encodes later using Booshman's tutorial.

But I'm currently having another small problem: I have a Blu-ray where I also want to replace tracks. However, the new tracks are 3 seconds longer than the ones that were authored into the structure. What happens now is that it works as usual to replace the tracks, but the playback just stops at the time where the old version ended, meaning 3 seconds early for the new encode. Is there also a way to solve this?

[Booshman]

Have to dig this thread up again: Swapping audio- and video-tracks works fine for me now. I'm using shitty proxy-encodes for Encore and swap them for the better encodes later using Booshman's tutorial.

But I'm currently having another small problem: I have a Blu-ray where I also want to replace tracks. However, the new tracks are 3 seconds longer than the ones that were authored into the structure. What happens now is that it works as usual to replace the tracks, but the playback just stops at the time where the old version ended, meaning 3 seconds early for the new encode. Is there also a way to solve this?

Did you replace the mpls as well as the clpi and m2ts files? If you did all and there is still the error I'd suspect you'll need to use bdedit to fix the duration. Not sure how you would do it but it would be where I would start.

Edit: Just had a look in bdedit and under the playlist tab there is a the length of the clip and in and out values, if you can edit them you should be able to fix your issue. Hopefully you can use the mpls created when you replaced the video stream and avoid bdedit altogether.