DV to Blu-ray: Burn as data, or encode as Blu-ray?
 

I'm capturing about 100 MiniDV tapes to AVI and I have a basic question for long term storage.

While I plan to keep the AVI files on my NAS and cloud backup, I'm also looking for a way to share the contents with some elder family members for their ease of viewing.

I noticed the AVI files are captured at an overall constant bitrate of 29.8 Mb/s. My understanding is that the Blu-ray SD MPEG-2 max bitrate is 15 Mb/s.

Based on this, is it factual that burning these files onto a Blu-ray as data would retain closer to original quality than encoding it to be played like a Blu-ray video? And if so, should most modern Blu-ray players be able to play AVIs burned onto Blu-ray discs?

DV should constant bitrate of 25Mbps, Anything else is indicating something gone wrong with the transfer or the player is not reading the real bitrate.

If there is a possible way of playing back the files as they are do so, if not you can de-interlace, resize to 1440x1080 and encode to h.264 square pixel and share over internet or flash media. Much easier than authoring onto a Blu-ray.

You're right, I was looking at the Overall Bitrate vs. just the Video Bitrate (details below).

So just to clarify, you're saying putting it into a h.264 MKV and then burn as data on a blu-ray would give a better probability of it working on their blu-ray players than the raw AVI?


General
Complete name : L:\DV Transfer\Adobe Premiere Pro Captured Video\Untitled114\Untitled Clip 08.avi
Format : AVI
Format/Info : Audio Video Interleave
Commercial name : DVCPRO
Format profile : OpenDML
Format settings : BitmapInfoHeader / WaveFormatEx
File size : 12.3 GiB
Duration : 58 min 59 s
Overall bit rate mode : Constant
Overall bit rate : 29.8 Mb/s
Frame rate : 29.970 FPS
Recorded date : 2003-06-30 09:28:29.000

Video
ID : 0
Format : DV
Commercial name : DVCPRO
Codec ID : dvsd
Codec ID/Hint : Sony
Duration : 58 min 59 s
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 24.4 Mb/s
Width : 720 pixels
Height : 480 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 4:3
Frame rate mode : Constant
Frame rate : 29.970 (30000/1001) FPS
Original frame rate : 29.970 (29970/1000) FPS
Standard : NTSC
Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:1:1
Bit depth : 8 bits
Scan type : Interlaced
Scan order : Bottom Field First
Compression mode : Lossy
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 2.357
Time code of first frame : 00:00:00;17
Time code source : Subcode time code
Stream size : 11.9 GiB (97%)
Encoding settings : ae mode=full automatic / wb mode=automatic / white balance= / fcm=manual focus

Audio
ID : 1
Format : PCM
Format settings : Little / Signed
Codec ID : 1
Duration : 58 min 59 s
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 1 024 kb/s
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 32.0 kHz
Bit depth : 16 bits
Stream size : 432 MiB (3%)
Alignment : Aligned on interleaves
Interleave, duration : 967 ms (28.99 video frames)

No, I said share over internet or flash media.

Yes, H.264 will likely be more compatible with Blu-ray players than DV.

But also, .MP4 will likely be more compatible than .MKV.

I wish it were easier to author a video Blu-ray.