I'm trying to create a real 25GB BD-R. At the cost of BD-Rs, I certainly don't want to create multiple disks, especially when all the videos appear to fit!

The files are from HDTV, eg 15-18Mbps, 1080i. I do have some HDV files 25Mbps but haven't tried those yet. Hope it wouldn't re-render those down to 20Mbps?! what's the point of SVRT?

I don't think it's increasing the bitrate, as I've never heard SW doing that- SVRT smart-renders and all- and normally w/ VBR if you give a higher bitrate, it will just use the existing data, never makes it artificially higher! never heard of that.

Also, I've played back the resulting M2TS files in PDVD8, and the files appear to have repeated segments- eg it's muxing in stuff wrong? that's why they are bigger, it's repeating stuff! I thought it was joining two files together, or repeating the entire existing file a 2nd time, but it's repeating some segments. Confirmed the original MPEG2 files are fine.
Can't believe both programs are this buggy to fail a simple operation?
This isn't even AVCHD hard stuff...

Edit:
OK, went back in PDVD8 to check bitrate etc: the 2nd title which ballooned 2x in size, indeed, had higher bitrates for video- rather than max 12Mbps etc, some spots it jumped to nearly 30Mbps peak, others 20, 21, 18 etc. The 5.1 audio also went from 384Kbps to 448kbps.

This is very odd- and annoying! I would think it would just default to smart-rendering everything, as that would save a LOT of time (and disk space!)? Is HDTV MPEG2 somehow not up to spec for BD-R? Why would LOWER bitrates not be up to spec? Is this BluRay spec, or just PD8/PowerProducer mucking things up?!