I can't believe how complicated my simple task has become.
I wanted to save some football games off my DVR so I can delete them and recorded it through a hauppauge device @ 14mbps w/ H.264 output to a .mp4 file.
I loaded into Premiere and edited out the commercials, then exported w/ H.264 Blu-Ray preset. It produced .m4v and .wav. I combined those in tsMuxer and created the Blu-Ray directory structure (w/ .m2ts container file), burned it to a Blu-Ray Verbatim BD-R, and it plays flawlessly in my PS3.
I wanted to add a menu and some other stuff before the football game plays. I opened up the .m2ts in Encore. Encore basically said "Pending" for the transcoding status forever. I bailed on that method. I then fed Encore the .m4v and the .wav for the video/audio and finally it processed the files so I could create a .iso to test out my menu, etc.
I played the .iso on my computer through Aurora (trial) and it for some reason doesn't launch to the menu...it just launches straight into the video...fine, whatever, but it works. When I put the Blu-Ray in my PS3, it took a while to load, went to the menu. I clicked play and then it jumped to somewhere the middle of the football game footage. I clicked play, and it sat forever...finally played smoothly for 5 seconds and then stopped, stutters, plays more for 2-3 seconds, etc. This repeats and basically is unwatchable/pathetic. My educated guess would be that somehow Encore created a video file with a higher mbps than what I gave it. I'm trying to recall if I'm imagining somewhere where I set 15mbps (up to 20mbps max) in Encore. I need to go look...this was the other day and I can't remember where I may have seen that. Why is the Blu-Ray skipping so badly? My PS3 plays Blu-Ray movies just fine, and I really thought those were 20mbps+. Any suggestions would be appreciated. As of now I can only count on what tSmuxer produces for me: the BDMV folders.
Unrelated question, but I created 1 menu, with 1 custom button from an image. The button in the unselected mode is not highlighted, and I confirmed this in the button-mode previews. However, when I preview the menu in Encore and move my mouse, the button highlights (which is the button selected image). When I burned the Blu-Ray disc, despite the stuttering, the menu does show on my PS3, but the image is immediately selected and highlighted.
Oh, one more unrelated question: It looks like the audio drifts out of sync from the video in Premiere. The original .mp4 is all in sync. I can't tell if when I cut the video and stitch it together to edit out commercials (ripple delete), if it is somehow screwing up. I didn't see out-of-sync issues in the first half of my 2.5 hr project. The 2nd half required me sliding the audio +00:15-20 frames to the right (later). The input/output audio spec looks identical in the project.
Thanks!