After finally purchasing a blu-ray burner and using third-party software as a trial, I was able to simply load the entire ISO file and get everything burned onto a 25GB blu-ray. Testing it on my projection screen, Star Wars has never looked or sounded as good (and I take the official blu-rays into consideration stating that). There were even chapters built in which I didn’t expect. Logic says I should simply be grateful and load ISOs of Empire and Jedi the same way.

On the other hand, I’ve been fixated on making menus for these films for some time now and, as things currently stand, Encore is the only readily available way to do this. My plan is to create the menus in Encore, create an ISO, and put that into the third-party software I settle on purchasing. However, I continue to invite chaos by trying to use Encore with its refusal to cooperate with codecs. I have imported both .m2ts and h.264 files of the film (h.264 being something Encore is “supposed” to support and deal with fine) and, under “Blu-ray Transcode Status,” I see “Pending (100%)” and when I try to build the ISO, I get a message stating it cannot be done because “This file is still in a pending state.” I’ve looked all around the Internet and found people with similar problems, but no concrete solution. I’ve experimented with different codec names and different muxings, only to find myself up against the same wall. Something I never did mention was that I use a Mac (hence the inability to use IMG Burn) which I’m worried might be an inhibiting factor in all this. Any success stories about loading high-def (namely h.264) files in Encore successfully, I would love to hear.