Better BD Authoring: TSMuxer or BDtoAVCHD?

Hello all,

I've finally ventured into the world of authoring and burning BDs from MKVs. Of course, a natural question would be: what's the best authoring program?

I always assumed that TSMuxer produces an HD output exactly the same quality as the MKV. There's no quality degradation. Would I be right in saying this? It doesn't limit the output. Does it?

However, I recently discovered the program BDtoAVCHD. It can produce various outputs: DVD-5, DVD-9, BD-25, BD-50, etc. As I'm now using BD-25s, I set it to author with BD-25 mode. I was surprised when it produced from a 10 GB MKV: a full 23 GB BD. The bitrate was noticeably higher than the base MKV. Now for my main question: does an increased bitrate make a BD look better than the base MKV, or would there by no upgrade? I'm not sure how much you could get by upping the bitrate.

If the increased bitrate does make a difference, I'd be interested in making this the main program I use for authoring.

I always assumed that TSMuxer produces an HD output exactly the same quality as the MKV. There's no quality degradation. Would I be right in saying this?

Yes.  Tsmuxer is just a muxer -- nothing more than that. It puts the contents of your MKV into a BD (or AVCHD) structure.  If the streams in your MKV are BD compliant, then you should do this.  If they are not, then you have to re-encode if you want to burn a disc that will work in Blu-ray players.

Now for my main question: does an increased bitrate make a BD look better than the base MKV, or would there by no upgrade?

BDtoAVCHD is re-encoding your video.  When you go from a lossy format to another lossy format, you always lose quality.

Really, BDtoAVCHD and tsmuxer do different jobs.  They are not alternatives to each other.  Unless you need an output that plays in stand-alone players, I suggest that you buy a decent media player and save yourself time and effort.

Thank you for the response, Chewtobacca. You're quite informative. I knew I was quite the nube thinking that BDtoAVCHD would produce better quality...

It seems that BDtoAVCHD is more of a shrink tool, hence the insistence on re-encoding.

If it's actually authoring you're after, MultiAVCHD is well worth a look... It can generated a menu structure with a certain degree of control (using an interface which is admittedly rather fiddly) and most importantly doesn't re-encode compliant streams.

Worth a shot, it's free!

Jonno said:

If it's actually authoring you're after, MultiAVCHD is well worth a look... It can generated a menu structure with a certain degree of control (using an interface which is admittedly rather fiddly) and most importantly doesn't re-encode compliant streams.

Worth a shot, it's free!

Thanks. I actually gave MultiAVCHD a shot, and it's all right. I just don't really have time to be working on menus and, for some strange reason, it stopped working on my computer... For that reason, I use one of the two programs above.