This was a project to covert a pre-existing 54 disc DVD box-set containing VHS transfers of the UK Channel 4 weekday-morning show The Big Breakfast (roughly covering the first year from 05 October 1992 up to 22 September 1993), to a 11 disc standard definition Blu-Ray set, with new menus, disc art & covers.

In August 2011, I contacted eBay UK user TapeThat who was selling one lot of 149 of home-recorded VHS tapes, as blanks. He mentioned that he was selling all his original tapes as he'd transferred them to DVD-Rs in 2003, and decided to have a clear-out. I bought his The Mary Whitehouse Experience S2 & Newman And Baddiel In Pieces DVD-R transfers in October 2011, then in Septmber 2012, I thought it might be worth getting copies of The Big Breakfast DVDs as many of them had advert breaks and I was looking for likely adverts for my Gamesmaster Series 1-7 DVD Boxset. Here is what the seller said at the time;


I paid a total of £107.55 including postage for the first 54 discs, and left the remaining 30. At the time I was only really interested in the adverts so getting the complete set wasn't a priority. The total running time for those 54 discs was 205h 33m 34s. I watched them at the time, and the discs just sat on my shelf (and trades list) for years. In April 2021, someone got in touch asking for a copy of the whole set. I've only ever duplicated the first five discs, once, back in November 2019. Copying all 54 DVD-Rs is no small task, so I decided to take the oppertunity to also re-authour them on to an 11 disc standard definition Blu-Ray set, which is much much less work should I need to copy them again in the future. It's worth adding that the footage itself is never re-encoded during the trasnfer. It's just a matter of extracting the original MPEG2 streams from the source DVDs, and authouring the same on to Blu-Ray discs. The footage itself is bit-for-bit identical to the source DVDs, they've just been shuffled up onto fewer larger capacity discs for ease of duplication. The footage is split up on each disc, as it was on each respective DVD-R.


I did offer my customer the choice of the original DVDs, or this new Blu-Ray set, but they stuck with the original DVDs. The selling of the 54 DVD copies allowed me to buy three additional Pioneer Blu-Ray drives (to add on to the one I already had), so I could now burn four identical Blu-Ray discs at once, rather than one single disc at a time, as I had been doing previously.

At the same time, I tried contacting TapeThat to get copies of the remaining 30 discs, just to be able to include everything available. I was able to track them down on Facebook. He still had all his DVD-R transfers as of May 2021, but they were in storage 130 miles away from him. He had no means of copying them, and wasn't keen on loaning them out for duplication, in case they went missing in the post. If this changes in the future, I'd revisit this project to add the extra episodes in. I also bought a copy of the official Big Breakfast 'Best Bits' VHS tape, in order to scan the cover for my artwork, and include a copy of the tape on the last disc of this set for completeness.

I decided to make five duplicates; the original for me, and four extras to sell on The Big Breakfast Ultimate Fan Page Facebook Group at £75 each + postage. Copying this set is still quite an undertaking even at 11 discs, but the artwork, menus and proper packaging, make it a little more worthwhile. If anyone else is interested in this set, I can add their name to the list and once I get four, I can duplicate another run of sets at some point in the future. If you're interested in any of my fanmade projects, you can contact me via email at , or through the Rob's Nostalgia Projects Facebook page. Check out & 'like' that Facebook page to see the latest in-progress updates to any current projects, and check out my Wants List to see if you can assist me with any future projects or upgrades.