Encoding for blu-ray playback.

[PuzZLeR]

First post, so please be gentle! Just reading from this forum has interested me in buying a blu-ray burner/player soon.

I’ve been encoding a lot of video to H.264/AVC to compress a lot of my MPEG-2 (for the same reasons someone would use DivX or Xvid). They’re mostly small clips and no HD (yet). I chose H.264 for its higher quality per file size and because it’s a standard for the next-gen players. I can only assume much more support in a couple of years.

Encoding at about 1Mbps, I get about 9 hours of SD-quality video on a DVD-R (as data). On a 50GB blu-ray disc, I should get about 100 hours (as data).

My (long-term) objective:
To one day actually play these files on BD, with menus, etc. NOT as data. No, I’m not expecting HD quality (obviously), just good playback on a regular video disc.

First, my details:

I encode in Main Profile (with some Baseline Profile backups for iPod).
I use encoding engines such as x264, Nero Digital and sometimes ffmpeg.
Average bitrate: ~1mbps per clip, VERY small compared to what’s in BD movies.
Resolution is 640x480.
Audio is AAC (LC) at 128kbps, 48000Hz, Stereo.

Now my questions:

1. Would I be able to load this video into a software package as is, and it would do minor transcoding for some adjustments (screen size, etc), or is it a serious re-encoding process?

2. Is there a conversion scheme that would be the least lossy from Main Profile to High Profile?

3. I probably shouldn’t expect 100 hours on a 50 GB BD video disc, but what would be realistic (ex: bitrates, etc.)?

4. Is there any software available today, that inputs H.264 (not MPEG-2) and can author to a disc? At least I can try out a disc image, just to be ready for “prime time” later. (Assuming it doesn't cost thousands.)

5. Since much of my source today is SD MPEG-2 it doesn’t make sense encoding in HD yet. But is there anything I CAN do today that will better prepare this video for the future?

Thanks so much for reading. If anybody has any input, I would appreciate it immensely. I'm still learning.

Geordie.