easiest bluray to mkv conversion?

[jdfwarrior]

I've been using Handbrake in the past for all my DVD backups and am looking for something similar in simplicity to create backups of my Bluray discs. I would like to be able to convert my discs to an mkv so that I have everything accessible and playable via XBMC. I was wondering what the easiest and fastest conversion from bluray to mkv was. I have looked through several threads and other places as well, I've looked at several of the mentioned tools (tsmuxer and such) and honestly didnt understand everything I was looking at. I finally downloaded ripbot264 and tried to back up one of my movies with it, but it took so long that it would take me over a week easily to convert the few discs I have now. On a 3.0ghz dual core with 4gb of ram, its taking 15 hours to convert a single movie with ripbot.

Are there any faster alternatives? As mentioned I want something that's relatively simple if possible, and if not, could someone point me to an easy to follow tutorial of the best way to convert them? Or is there some way I can speed up ripbot? It's easy enough to use, I would like it if it didn't take so long.

Any suggestions?

[Baldrick]

What profile are you using in ripbot264? and what encoding mode? 2-pass? Try constant quality/quantizer mode and it might go a bit faster(you can't set the output file size then). And maybe also resize to 1280x.

But HD h264 encoding is slow, so if you want much faster encoding maybe try convert to divx/xvid hd or mpeg2 hd...or get an even faster CPU...or maybe hardware nvida cuda encoding(but the quality doesn't seem that good yet).

[jdfwarrior]

Ha CUDA would be nice, could use my two 8800's in SLI and crank that out pretty fast. I dont remember what all the settings were but I will check it when I get home and may try it again tonight to test the speed. Using the default settings though took forever. I did one movie on my htpc, and another on my desktop, the desktop is a 3.6ghz quad with 8gb of ram, and it still took 7-8 hours on it.

Thanks for the suggestions Baldrick. I will give that a shot. Also, if I decided to go the route of converting to divx or xvid instead, whta method of conversion would you suggest? Which app(s)?

Thanks

[GeeForce11]

Re-encoding a 1080p movie takes a long time. Could save or cut the time in half if you resize it to 720p if it's worth it for you. I'm using VDubMod to convert the m2ts to XviD/AC3 1080p avi and it takes 8-12 hrs on my 2.6 dually. It's much quicker than Ripbot264 to H264/AC3 1080p mp4/mkv. The encoding settings you use also make a big difference.

The only fast way without re-encoding the movie to create an mkv file from the m2ts with eac3to. One step example: "eac3to BD_FOLDER movie.mkv" In this case the mkv will contain all the streams from the m2ts (will be the same size) but it will be easier to play back with multimedia players.

You could leave the video stream unconverted "eac3to movie.m2ts 2: video.mkv" will contain only the original video stream and convert the preferred audio stream "eac3to movie.m2ts 3: audio.ac3 -640". Then just mux the video.mkv and audio.ac3 to movie.mkv that will give you the smallest video file you could make without re-encoding the movie.

[jdfwarrior]

Would it be worth it to try something like BD Rebuilder to shrink the file first before I try to convert to mkv?

thanks for the suggestions guys, keep em coming..

[GeeForce11]

I've never used it, and don't know how long it takes to encode and shrink the BD structure to smaller size with it, and the quality loss involved, but then you can convert it to mkv.