nos402 said:

I downloaded the AVCHD from myspleen. So far just tested it by streaming it from my laptop to my TV via Plex Media Server (unfortunately I think that causes a little audio lag since it's being transcoded on the fly...there was no lag when played directly on my computer in VLC). This is all a brave new world for me but it's worth it for the Despecialized versions! Still learning and sorting all this out. I'm hoping to keep the best quality files I can on an R2-D2 USB drive for playing at a friend's home theater.

You can try encoding the AVCHD to an MKV (or M4V if you have iTunes/AppleTV) to see if that alleviates the audio lag.

Use MakeMKV to convert to MKV. This should keep the entire contents of the film/audio/subtitles intact, and create a file that's the exact same size and quality as the originally included data.

One thing I do is run the movie through Handbrake, which compresses the file to something a lot more manageable (eg. putting files on my PS3 requires them to be less than 4GB).

If you're concerned that Handbrake is going to ruin the picture quality, I'd recommend setting the Constant Quality slider to 21 (HD sources should be between 21 and 23, with 21 being best quality and 23 being smallest size).

Oh, and keep in mind that Handbrake doesn't play well with Bluray subtitles (PGS files), so you'll have to import SRT files from Project Threepio (also available on the spleen) into Hanbrake instead of using the subtitles which were included in the AVCHD.