Thursday, September 2, 2010

Blu-ray ISO Mounting and Playback Guide with BD capacity (122509 Update Player Troubleshooting)

Since I’ve been fiddling around different software for the past two days, I’m semi-happy with what I got so far. I’ll just summarize my experience.
My system is still winxp SP3, it’s relatively old for multimedia purpose, but still kicking.

The Blu-ray playback software:


powerdvd8


1. PowerDVD 8 Ultra version 2217a with HD-DVD add-on.
2. TotalMedia Theatre 3 with SimHD plugin. (TMT3 for short)
3. WinDVD 9.






TMT3


I have achieved playing actual discs with all three software via a Lite-on BDROM. For playback quality, my preference is: PowerDVD (Hardware Acceleration [HA] on)>WinDVD 9 (HA on)>TMT3 (HA OFF). PowerDVD gives the best visual quality, but BDMV folder playback and image capture function are disabled on build 2217a; while I didn’t spent too much time on winDVD 9 since it doesn’t do anything; TMT3 can play BDMV folder directly, plus it can capture images as long as the disc has no AACS protection (can capture images from Blu-ray ISO). But TMT3’s video quality is definitely the worst among the three, even after turning off hardware acceleration; with hardware acceleration on, the video quality is even worse, any still images will show aliasing lines, and the DVD playback is totally crapped out! So for serious viewing on PC, powerDVD is the way to go, TMT3 is only good for its functions, winDVD is somewhere in the middle…

For mounting Blu-ray ISO without a physical discs, first you’ll need that famous UDF2.50 reader if you are still using winxp. powerDVD has no problem with either Alcohol 120% or Virtual CloneDrive. TMT3 don’t like Alcohol 120%. After reading around online, I think I found the explanation:


Photobucket
Emulation from Alcohol puts Blu-ray ISOs as a giant DVD-ROM, while from Virtual CloneDrive regards them as a BD-R; although when building the images in Imgburn, I think Imgburn still treat them as DVD-ROM.


Photobucket


Obtaining Blu-ray ISO:
So far, only two pieces of software are easy to use: AnyDVD HD and DVDFab HD Decrypter. AnyDVD HD can work on-the-fly, while DVDFab only works on dumping files to hard drive. After obtaining BDMV folder from the disc, the best option is to make ISO using Imgburn (I think AnyDVD HD can put ISO file directly). The reason I don’t like BDMV folder is because Blu-ray file structures are quite complicated, I don’t want to mess them up, this is especially important if you want to process m2ts in tsmuxer, eac3to later on; making an ISO will make the files read-only and not writable within the ISO so that you won’t mess up the original structure. The drawback to this is that you cannot put a srt/ssa/ssa subtitle file under the “stream” folder, load up mpc/Kmplayer/Potplayer to play the streams with subtitles. But currently the all these multimedia players are still poor at handling raw m2ts streams if there’s Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA advanced codecs, I wouldn’t worry too much of losing this convenient feature.
Before burning, to make the ISO playable in software players such as PowerDVD, you’ll need to have a complete Blu-ray structure:
BDMV
-----AUXDATA
-----BACKUP
------------BDJO
------------CLIPINF
------------JAR
------------PLAYLIST
-----BDJO
-----CLIPINF
-----JAR
-----META
-----PLAYLIST
-----STREAM
CERTIFICATE

More info HERE.






So to summarize all the above, here is the procedures:
PC:
Original Disc->AnyDVD HD(can handle BD+)/DVDFab HD->BDMV->(Complete Blu-ray structure if folders are missing)->IMGBURN UDF2.50 making ISO+MDS/BDISO->Alcohol 120% / Virtual CloneDrive mounting->PowerDVD 8 2217a HA on / TMT3 HA off (specifically used for Title/Pop-up menu captures).

PC with additional subtitle without losing menu:
It is possible at the moment with BDMV titles, some people report that they have successfully muxed in audios and subtitles into m2ts and tricked clipinf files to have a valid stream. I haven’t tried the guide yet.

PS3 without subtitle:
Mounted BDISO->TVersity with transcoding off+add BDMV folder to share->PS3 (only works on simple m2ts with LPCM, poor at handling complex Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA)
PS3 with additional subtitle:
Mounted BDISO->tsmuxer with srt subtitle/4GB cut->FAT32 USB drive->AVCHD manager/AVCHDme->PS3 (no restriction, but menu is lost).
Maximum size for blank Blu-ray discs:

BD-R
12,219,392 Sectors
25,025,314,816 bytes = 24,438,784 KB = 23,866 MB = 23.31 GB

BD-RE
11,826,176 Sectors
24,220,008,448 bytes


BD-R DL
24,438,784 Sectors
50,050,629,632 bytes
46.61 GB

BD-RE DL
23,652,352 Sectors
48,440,016,896 bytes

"If the disc is formatted with what's known as 'spare areas' for error correction etc (part of the blu-ray standard), that size will be smaller still.”
http://forum.imgburn.com/index.php?showtopic=8315
Imgburn to turn on spare areas:
Tools-->Settings-->Write-->Prefer Format Without Spare Areas (versions after 2.4.3.0 has this on as default)






Here goes the 122509 update:
A little bit about the players troubleshooting, mainly for TMT3 going explode (causing PC immediate reboot, no BSOD, not even a chance for memory dump). So this is the third time I got hit by this, last two times I got away from it by reinstalling winxp because I did have a reason to, but this time I definitely DO NOT wish to reinstall. So I did a bit research online, and found out I’m NOT alone. The only difference is that some users were speculating about hardware+driver deficiency, while my situation is that it occurs when I installed Canopus Edius NLE on my system (so more like pure software incompatible).
Here’s the procedure I solved the problem this time:
Uninstall Canopus Edius
Uninstall Canopus codec
Uninstall TMT3 completely (manual register and folder cleaning required, see below for details)
REBOOT
Install Canopus
Install TMT3 –> Reboot –> Update to latest .160 version as of this writing –> Reboot

And miracle did happen when I did the above steps.
Details on how to clean uninstall TMT3:
Step 1: Please uninstall the program in the Control Panel. If you have other ArcSoft programs installed, please uninstall them too. Then delete the program files in "C:\Program Files\ArcSoft\TotalMedia Theatre" folder (the installation directory).
Step 2: Delete all the files and the folders (including the hidden ones) in "C:\Users\<username>\Application Data\ArcSoft" and "C:\Program Files\Common Files\ArcSoft" folders.
Step 3: Double check "archlp.sys" in "C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers" has been deleted, if not, please deletes it manually.
Step 4: Clean up the registration files:
1).Go to the Vista Start menu and click in the Start Search Dialog Box, type "regedit" and press Enter.
2).Delete "[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ArcSoft]" and "[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ArcSoft]" these two nodes.
Step 5: Reinstall TMT after rebooting the computer.


Reference Links:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1118509
https://ssl.arcsoft.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=1359&PID=6030
http://www.arcsoft.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=1642&PN=3


File system:
For cars mp3 CD:
change the filesystem to ISO9660 + Joliet
Joliet is what most standalones will look for when playing MP3 / DivX discs.
Use UDF when you’re burning DVD Video / HD DVD / Blu-ray discs.

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