Compressing BD-50 blu ray's to fit on a BD-25 disc.

I haven't looked at the software but one I have read about is BD Rebuilder
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=143716

I'm not sure if the BD25 reduced size file is playable from standalone, PS3 or only from a PC

IMHO, don't get involved with the whole compression thing -

Short answer, no there is no single program to strip out extras like DVDShrink, however, the process is VERY easy using 3 (or 4) programs:

http://forum.slysoft.com/showpost.ph...81&postcount=1

I repeat, it's VERY easy to do this (and I hate learning new things) - strip out everything except the main movie and you are almost always left with an iso smaller than 25 gb

BD Rebuilder is a 1-click process to do exactly that, will strip out everything if you so require & put the movie only on a BD-25 or even a BD9 (DVD+ RL).

What kind of time is required for this (curious, not challenging) - in reading the thread on this (beta) product is appears that folks were spending up to 24 hours simply re-encoding a single movie w/o extras-
Maybe it's gotten better?

for a 1.5hr movie on a dual core e2200 basic cpu it took 16 hrs on mine. The dark knight took 22hrs

Sone with good 3+ghz quad cores were doing it in 6-8 hrs

Yes, you should have no problems as long as you stick to the BD specs. Heck, I re-encoded 2 movies to AVCHD ("home made" blu ray) on DVD5 and they play fine in my Panny BD35. MeGUI and tsMuxer truly are God sends

No, I heve never used it. I use DGAVCIndex to index the frames in the h264 file, AviSynth to resize and frameserve, MeGUI to reencode video with x264 and to transcode the audio if necessary, finally I use tsMuxer to create the BD structure which I burn onto a disc with ImgBurn. Of course you need AnyDVDHD to be able to copy the necessary files to the hard drive. My method probably takes longer than using BDrebuilder, but it works for me so I'll stick with it until I hear that BDRebuilder is past the beta stage.

Please read the link in post #3 - very easy to do and doesn't take 12 hours(!)

I've tried BD-Rebuilder (also using The Dark Knight) and stripped out just the main movie and sized it to fit on a DVD-9 disc. The results were virtually indistinguishable from the original BD rip. There are options for compressing either the full disc or just the main movie to either BD-25, DVD-9, or DVD-5. You should have no problems getting your movie shrunk to fit on a BD-25 disc and the results will be fantastic.

Keep in mind that BD-Rebuilder is still just a beta release so expect to encounter an occasional bug. I did get an error message during the process but it didn't seem to affect the overall processing or results.

I'm a long-time user of DVD-Rebuilder (also developed by jDobbs) and it's by far the best app available for compressing standard DVDs. Lots of people like DVD Shrink but DVD-RB blows it out of the water with respect to picture quality. I would expect nothing less than the best from BD-Rebuilder. It may be time consuming, but you have to realize what you're dealing with. The amount of data being processed is massive so expect the time involved to reflect the task at hand.

DVD9s are still expensive if you want to buy the good stuff. Hit and miss cheap off a spindle discs can be had for little less than a buck. But my guess is that it will be a long long time before even 25GB discs are affordable.

From my experience, this is not true! If you enable the 2-pass encoding in DVD Shrink, the results are equal (and some times better) than with DVD Rebuilder. Also, DVD SHrink is a 100 times faster...

Furthermore, the new BR Rebuilder lacks the option to rebuild to BD-50. Why would I need that? Because I don't want any recoding to keep the image at the best possible level, but still I need to strip all the extras, unneeded languages, etc. to save space on my media server.

I'm putting all my hopes into SlySofts CloneBR, which is apparently under development!

Regards!

That all depends on which encoder you're using with DVD-RB. If you're using the freeware QuEnc that comes with DVD-RB then I'd be inclined to agree with you. I'm using CCE (CinemaCraft Encoder) and the results are noticeably better than DVD Shrink, at least with the movies I tried it with. I haven't used DVD Shrink in a very long time so I have no idea if they've made improvements to it.

DVD Shrink is definitely much faster than DVD-RB, but then DVD-RB does a much better job at re-encoding the data than DVD Shrink, IMHO. I'd rather use an app that takes the time to do the job right than give me a quick and dirty fix in less time.

Please tell where you bought them from, the cheapest I have seen is $11.00 a piece.

IME DVD Shrink does an OK job if you're not too picky and if you're not compressing to less than about 75% of the original program size. Any more compression than that and DVD Shrink can look pretty awful.

I have always used the free HC encoder (Hank's encoder) with DVD-RB and it is excellent. DVD-RB is an excellent product and one can expect that BD-RB will become one too (it is still in the early beta stage of development).

Newegg has the 10-pk Verbatim 25GB BD-R discs for $49.99 and only $6.99 shipping.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817130047