What flavors of H264 will my Sony Bluray player like?

I spent days building the perfect DVD9 of "The Lorax" I shed all but two of the soundtracks (main and commentary) and inched up the bitrate until it just fit on a DVD9 disk (about 8.5 GB). I used VirtualDub 32 bit and set the H.264 codec to single-pass constant rate factor 17.5 and kept the original size (1920 by 1080). It would not play the DVD9 so I tried the original Matroska on a WD Passport. It still would not play. How must I adjust the codec so the Sony will play it? Thank you in advance for your responses.

Ted, I didn't know you could playback 1080p content from a "dvd" structure. I thought that the codecs in the player were dictated by the type of disk that was being played back?

Does your bluray player support playing back just video files instead?

I should clarify. I ripped my Blu-ray, reencoded the H.264 stream to a more compact size (still 1080p though) and muxed that with several AC3 streams (again from the Blu-ray) to make a Matroska with one hi-def H.264 stream and several AC3 streams. I burned this to a DVD9, so in this case the DVD is just a media carrier like a thumb drive, or the little WD Passport I use. I tried to play it. The Sony Bluray player started to play it and hung and had to be "cold-booted". It did the same when I tried to play the same Matroska from the little Passport. Since it plays other Matroskas I have made fine I suspect it's the exact codec setting I am using. That's what I meant. There's no DVD or Bluray structure as such; it's just a DVD9 used as a data disk and with my Matroska on it. I hope that clears it up. I suspect my codec settings are distasteful somehow to the Sony.

Ah, that makes sense. Shows how much I know about the DVD formats. DVD9 is just a "data" DVD, got it.

I vaguely remember something about needing to only use the "low" profile option in h.264 for some players. I have no clue if that is what is happening here, but I'll see if I can track down where I heard/read that.

I believe the Blu-ray player will have to support the specific video codecs you want to use...
What is the model # of the Sony? I wanna say a bad joke that Sony won't support any codec unless its own. :P

Yeah, I'm almost 100% sure that Sony anything will not play an Mkv file. I've had the same issue with ripping my bluray collection so that I may stream it to my PS3. I've found that mp4 or m2ts formats work best. I use a software called aunsoft blu-ray video converter ultimate for this and it works great. I've done this manually with handbrake and various other applications but it is too time consuming.

I don't recall the exact model of the Sony player. It does play some of my Matroskas but not others. I don't know why exactly it plays some but not others. I think there are tiny technical differences, possibly just the H.264 codec settings. I found a page somewhere that listed the requirements for a Bluray player to play files. Instead of laboring to hit those restrictions I should just build myself an HTPC.

Thank you for all the replies.

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Originally Posted by TedBellLover

I don't recall the exact model of the Sony player. It does play some of my Matroskas but not others. I don't know why exactly it plays some but not others. I think there are tiny technical differences, possibly just the H.264 codec settings. I found a page somewhere that listed the requirements for a Bluray player to play files. Instead of laboring to hit those restrictions I should just build myself an HTPC.

Thank you for all the replies.

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Mediainfo is your friend. Use this application to look at each file and compare one that works and one that doesnt. Keep in mind mkv is just a container and each file can differ greatly within said container.

I have 4 Sony BR players. They all suck for mkv playback. Moving to a Plex Media Server at home combined with HTPC and Roku and iOS playback devices was the best thing I ever did. Been quite a while since I've even turned on one of my Sonys.