A few weeks ago I showed you how to backup your Blu-rays using BD Rebuilder. This week, I’ll show you how to do it with an alternative program, AVCHDCoder.
AVCHDCoder is a decidedly different program than BD Rebuilder. It’s feature set is much larger for one thing. For another, it can produce Blu-rays from non-Blu-ray sources. This is highly useful in the creation of AVCHD disks from home videos and the like. But that is for another tutorial. Today we are just going to be backing up our precious store-bought Blu-rays.
Let’s get started.
Step 1)
Make sure that you have Java installed and the usual suspects (Avisynth, Haali Media Splitter, etc…)
Step 2)
Make sure that AVCHDCoder is in BDMV-mode.
Step 3)
Load your source and select the main movie playlist using the Playlist to convert drop-down menu. Press the Set button. Press Next if necessary.
Step 4)
You should now be on the Select Streams tab. Edit your streams until they represent your desired output. In this case I want to do a full resolution backup (1920 x 1080p), using just the first audio track and the first subtitle track. You can adjust your own settings or use similar versions of mine. Press the Add button when you are finished to add your Blu-ray to the final composition.
Step 5)
You should now be on the Output tab. Select your destination size (a single-layer DVD in this case, because I’m cheap). Remember, a greater destination size allows for a higher bitrate and thus higher quality backup. However, make sure that you can properly handle your output size. For instance, if you were to select the BD-25 option, make sure that you have a Blu-ray burner and a spare BD-25 disk lying around, otherwise you will have to do your backup all over again.
Go ahead and title your disk if you want to (it’s good practice, but I didn’t show it in the screenshot below), then select your output settings. I’m going to burn this disk using IMGBurn when I’m done, so I went ahead and selected the ISO option to keep things easy for me. Select your destination folder and check the Delete temp folder after conversion option if you don’t won’t to keep your temporary files (most people won’t).
Lastly, click the Add to Queue button to finalize your settings and add the project to the encoding queue.
Step 6)
Now, before you go ahead and start the encoding process, you may want to adjust the encoder’s priority. You can do this by going up to Options->CPU Priority. Under normal circumstances when I am encoding something, I want to set the priority to Normal (like you can see in the screenshot). However, if you wanted to continue to use the computer while the encode process was going on, you may want to set it to something a little lower like Below Normal or Low. The reason you may want to use Normal is that it can result in a faster encoding process. It’s your choice.
Step 7)
Last but certainly not least, press the big, colorful Convert button. Then sit back and enjoy the ride while your computer does all the dirty work!
Conclusion
Once your encode has finished, you can burn your ISO (or files) to a DVD or Blu-ray disk of your choice. There are a variety of programs out there such as the (FREE!) IMGBurn or Nero that will be able to burn your shiny new ISO file for you. Enjoy your very own Blu-ray backup!
Related posts:
- Backing up Blu-rays with BD Rebuilder
- Convert Bluray to DVD with AVStoDVD
- Burn Single Layer Video DVD’s With IMGBurn
Thanks for the article, but could you please tell me all of the other programs needed, you list a few then etc.
thanks again.
Sure, no problem. You may already have these installed, but just in case.
This program is awesome!
However, I haven’t got to run it successfully yet.
The problem is that I followed the installation guide, installing avisynth, ffdshow, haali, etc, but no good.
Running Vista by the way. Don’t know if it’s design for XP or 7.
Vista sucks.
hi, does this work ok on a sony bdps360 ??,, i can see after looking on the main site that it works on the 350 ok.
many thanks in advance
Unfortunately, I couldn’t tell you for sure, but in all likely hood, with a high quality DVD or Blu-ray disk (read: not cheap), it should work just fine. I don’t have that player, so I can’t test, but if it’s older cousin worked, then this one should work as well.
Your going to have to tell me more than “no good”, as I have no idea what that means. Does it crash, does it present an error, does it fail to boot, etc?
According to the programs author, AVCHDcoder works just fine in Windows 7, so it may be a configuration issue on your end.
thanx adub
thanx adub for the response.
Since I had a problem with BD Rebuilder, I decided to try AVCHDCoder and this is what happened. Errorcode: 0×0003, Error occured when demuxing with tsMuxer. Any insight on this issue. I will try BD Rebuilder again.
Tell me what drives/burners i need to back up a blu ray disc on my Windows Vista Premium computer?
I’m sorry I should have asked exactly what are all the components I need to back up a blu ray disc using Windows Vista Premium including GB space ect.
Thanks, Dale
You may have a bad rip, tytyho12, if you are unable to demux it properly. Make sure that you are using the latest version of AnyDVD HD and try re-ripping.
@Dale
It depends on what your desired output format is. If you want a full Blu-ray to Blu-ray backup, then you will need a Blu-ray burner drive. If you just want to backup to a DVD, then all you need is a Blu-ray reader to rip the disk and then a DVD drive to burn the DVD. Most Blu-ray reader drives can do both (read Blu-ray’s and read/write DVD’s).
There are a number of drives available on sites such as Newegg or TigerDirect.
@Dale,
That’s kind of a loaded question that depends on a few things. In short, you need at least 50 GB of free space to rip one Blu-ray disk. So, a shiny new 1 TB drive should work just fine for a long while.
In order to encode your backup’s in a timely manner, the faster your processor the better. In addition, the more cores the better (aka. 2 core vs. quad core).
In terms of RAM, I recommend 1GB+ minimum, preferably 2GB+.
Plus the drive(s) I mentioned in the previous comment.
What kind of picture quality is there when backing up a blu ray to a dvd5 or dvd9?
Will this also backup the audio hd like dtshd or truehd?
In all honesty, the picture quality can be really amazing. Depending on your preferences (and your eyes) some people have come out with transparent rips.
As for the audio, I believe that the AVCHD format only supports AC3 and PCM, so no, I don’t believe that the HD audio will be kept. However, if you use a relatively high AC3 bitrate, I doubt you will be able to tell the difference.
Tried a re-rip of a different movie this time and having the same error code. Are there any settings in AnyDVD HD or ACVHD that I shoul adjust. Should i rip to my harddrive or an image in AnyDVD? What gives? I don’t understand. Makes me want to just return the burner and stick with DVD’s.
Thanks for the posts, I just followed all the tutorals and just finished ripping my 1st BD/dvd. The quality is amazing. It took 18hrs to rip a 43Gb movie to 4.7Gb!
@$bill, I’m glad that you had such success! Isn’t the world of HD great!
@tytyho12
Make sure that you are able to play the ripped version of your disk before trying to back it up. If you can’t play it, you can’t encode it, and you will need to work on getting your codecs setup properly before moving forward.
Been using this program to do AVCHD movie to play on PS3 and it is awesome.great program,I recommend it
orion, I’m glad that it worked so well for you. Good luck with your backups!
[...] tutoriel (en anglais) pour ce logiciel peut être consulté ici. Filed Under: [...]
Does memory have anything to do with errors during backing up of blu ray discs? I noticed that AVCHDCoder was working better when I cleared some space on my system drive but then the low memory space flashed then it came up with an error code. I am in the process of upgrading my system hard drive to 1TB. Do you think this will solve the problems I’ve been having with backing up blu rays. Also, once you rip a blue ray with AnyDVD, can you play it on Windows media player or do you nee a blu ray program like PowerDVD? Finally, do you need dbPoweramp for AVCHDCoder to work properly? Thanks for all the info.
What are all the programs I need for AVCHDCoder?
Excellent, amazing and wonderful! Ever since following and installing AVCHDCoder, I had successfully converted 3 movies to AVCHD-DVD so far.
Since building a new computer for my son during christmas, I ‘ve been itching to try this Blu-ray on DVDs. Initially I had 4 unsuccessful attempts but found out that I miss installing AVISYNTH because alI others was already present.
All I can say about the quality is nothing short of amazing – FULL HD.
Thank you very much.
Adub: Upgraded to Win 7 and the program runs fine now.
However, when I do the test to check if everything is installed correctly, I get
a “failed” warning for VC1 Decoding. The rest are fine.
What could it be? I checked the settings and they are all fine.
Thanks
@tytyho12
Windows Media Player will not be able to play Blu-ray disks. If you want to be able to play Blu-ray disks with a menu, you will need a player like PowerDVD or Total Media Theater.
As to your low space issues, yes, working with a 1 TB harddrive is recommended and may solve you problem. And dbPowerAmp is not necessary, unless using the WMVHD function of AVCHD, as described on the program’s website. The website also describes all of the necessary programs if you are still curious
@monstaA1
I’m glad that you that it worked so well for you!
@Tony
You may not have a proper VC-1 decoder installed. For one, make sure that FFDShow has it’s VC-1 setting set to wmv9 and that Windows Media Player 11 is installed.
New to this so stupid question. Will backing up a blue ray disc to a blank blue ray disk using this method retain the full sound qulaity? I simply want to duplicate the original blue ray onto a blank blue rasy recodable disc. thanks.
Yes, if you set the audio target to “Untouched”, you will have perfect audio. However, I question why you would want to run your disk through a program like AVCHDCoder, if you are just going to burn it back to a Blu-ray disk.
Provided that your source disk is not too large, or that you have a large enough Blu-ray disk to burn to, you can simply rip your Blu-ray disk and then burn it right back. No need for compression or further tweaking. However, you can ONLY do this if your disk match in size, or the source disk is smaller than the destination disk.
Okay so I had a 1TB system drive installed with Windows 7 Ultimate. I ripped a blu ray with AnyDVD checked that it played. Sill getting error code (17:02:24 Creating AVS file: DirectShowsource(“C:\Users\Quan\Documents\AVCHDCoder\Temp\Up – item 1\joined.m2ts”,fps=23.976,audio=false).AssumeFPS(24000,1001).addborders(0,0,0,0)
17:02:24 Encoding Pass 1: “C:\Program Files\AVCHDCoder\Tools\X264\32bit\x264.exe” –pass 1 –vbv-bufsize 40000 –vbv-maxrate 40000 –bitrate 28005 –level 4.1 –stats “C:\Users\Quan\Documents\AVCHDCoder\Temp\Up – item 1\Up.stats” –keyint 24 –min-keyint 2 –ipratio 1.1 –pbratio 1.1 –fps 23.976 –sar 1:1 –weightp 0 –nal-hrd –aud –output NUL “C:\Users\Quan\Documents\AVCHDCoder\Temp\Up – item 1\Up.avs”
17:02:27 Converting video pass 1: Errorcode: 0×0401,Error occured when converting video). Any insight? Also, I tried to redownload BD rebuilder but it keeps saying that I need FFDshow to work but it’s installed. Any insight on that? Thanks for any info you may have.
Wait a minute. Which program are you using? AVCHDCoder or BD Rebuilder? Also, which version are you using?
If you are using AVCHDCoder, the installer should install and configure FFDShow for you. Did you let it do that?
I used AVCHDCoder first and when it gave me an error message I tried installing BD rebuilder. I installed FFDshow separately. And I’m not sure which version I’m using. Which ones do you recommend? I noticed on the link you sent me that FFDshow, Haali splitter, and AviSynth should be delivered with AVCHD but they weren’t. I had to download those separately. Is there a site where I can download all of the software together? I could start from scratch. Thanks again for the info.
Hi, I am the author of AVCHDCoder. I want to clear some things up.
First of all AVCHDCoder never messes with your system by itself. All action come from the user. This means that you have to install all apps manually. The correct installers can be launched from within AVCHDCoder. The installation Guide will tell you what to do. For Windows 7 you need to do some extra steps. If you don’t do it you are not be able to get it to work on Windows 7.
On my website you can always find a list of the currently known bugs. Next release is planned for Februari 1st. It will contain major fixes.
Thanks for the info.
Thanks Adub and Twan for all the help with AVCHDCoder. I have finally been able to start using the program. I’m not sure of the results as of yet, had to go work, but the program is running and I should know something by tonight.
I had one more question, how do you set up IMGburn to automatically burn the iso when it’s done?
Again thanks for all the info and support.
Automatically burning the iso is not possible because AVCHDCoder works with a Queue. Let’s say you could burn. That means the queue hangs because you are not at home and a disc is required. I think creating the iso is enough. Burning the iso is better to do that manually. Now you can check the result before burning :)
Ok thanks.
Thanks guys my first disk was a success. It took 15hrs from start to finish but it works and everything looks and sounds great. Thanks again for all the help.
I’m glad that you were able to get everything figured out tytyho12!
Since it took so long, you may want to look at using a faster profile if you don’t care that much about quality. Or get a faster computer :)
I’m looking for an app that will back-up a blu-ray to a single mp4/h264 file. So that I can store this on my NAS and replay back through various media streamers. I notice that this app will have different outputs but will it do what I want it to do?
No, not really. Your in luck though. I was planning on writing a tutorial this weekend on how to do exactly that using a program called Ripbot, which takes most of the guess work out of converting a Blu-ray to MP4. Would you like me to write one this weekend?
I was thinking of looking at ripbot the other day but AVCHD Coder got installed. Anyway I have used AVCHD and think it is great except for my prob above but I guess it I’d not designed for that. Well done to Twan anyhow. As for the guide If I had the time I would. Too much nagging from the wife for DIY. :-) thanks for the heads up on Ripbot (264 I’m assuming).
P.s Blu-ray conversion took around 3hrs just main movie on a intel i7 2.80 Ghz.
Okay, well I plan on putting up the guide this weekend, so if you still want to do it in the future, you can use it as reference. Also, there are several other programs that can achieve the same output, so I might write up on those as well. Let me know if you need more help.
I’m having trouble getting past step 3 part 2. I select blu ray and i can point to the BDMV folder but when the playlist to convert shows up and I hit the set button nothing happens and I can not access the streams tab. I have tried 5 different movies and it’s the same result. Can someone please help?
And after hitting “Set”, what happens if you click the “Next” button?
nothing because the next button never shows up.
Huh, now that is odd. You do have the latest version of Java, correct? It may be a bug. Since the author checks back here on occasion he may see this problem.
That is odd. You do see a list (or only 1 item) of playlists after opening the BDMV folder? (So it isn’t empty?) Maybe it is related to the problem described on: http://tools.twanwintjes.nl/index.php?page=bugs (Problems) You can try to move The BDMV folder to the root of your harddisk drive. If it doesn’t help just email me.
Note: AVCHDCoder originally had no BDMV support. It was added in a later stage. It wasn’t designed for Blu-ray import. BDMV import depends on eac3to. So maybe it is a bug with AVCHDCodereac3to.
It’s weird after I tried a few more I gave up and installed powerdvd so I could at least watch my blu rays on the laptop and ever since I installed it, the program works fine now. Is it normal for it to take like 16-18hours to convert to a BluRay25 ?
Chances are you are now using PowerDVD’s decoding filters, so that’s why it started working.
Since you are encoding on your laptop (and I assume your laptop isn’t some beast of a rig with a ridiculous processor) 16-18 hours isn’t outside of the realm of possibility. If you want to speed up the process, try using a faster (albeit lower quality) profile.
2.93ghz core2duo and 4gb ram. I thought about trying it on my desktop which is a 2.4ghz core2quad with 6gb ram but I’d have to hook up the drive via esata and I wasn’t sure if that would kill the throughput speeds.