Onlydarksets

Up until now, every Blu-ray disc I own has had the movie contained in a single, humungous M2TS file (usually 20-25GB).  Today I encountered a disc that has a bunch of smaller M2TS files.  This is, apparently, called a “seamless branching” Blu-Ray disc.  In order to play it back from the hard drive via the HD-100 SageTV extender, you have to find the main movie stream and merge the files together.

Luckily, there is a turnkey solution for this – ToNMT (NMT is the “Networked Media Tank”, which is essentially the same hardware as the HD-100/HD-200).  Just make sure you run it on the actual BR disc (or a complete copy of the disc), as opposed to just the Stream folder.

Alternatively, if you are just interested in seeing which stream is the movie stream, you can use BDInfo.

UPDATE: I spoke too soon – I couldn’t get ToNMT to force conversion to AC3.  Since the HD-100 doesn’t support anything else (at least in my configuration), that’s a no go.  Luckily, tsRemux will load a playlist, so I just used BDInfo to find the correct playlist.  I haven’t thought through the workflow yet, but if I come across another seamless branching disc, I’ll put together something.