How to reduce the bit rate of Blu-ray content on hard drive

[WillN]

I use DVDFab to rip Blu-ray movies from the disks. If the size is big, I can reduce the bit rate with the program and burn. But the problem is it takes too long, 4 to 5 hours, to do the job. Can I just rip the movies without reducing the bit rate to the hard drive, then use another program to reduce the bit rate later and burn to a disk? If yes, is it shorter this way and what program should I use? Thanks.

[redwudz]

What size is your desired output and what quality do you want? Taking a ~25GB high definition file, usually with DTS or similar audio, and reducing it down to 8GB or 4GB takes time and a lot of processing power, especially if you want to retain any quality. 4 to 5 hours is fairly quick. It takes me about 6 hours to backup a BD movie to a 8GB HD MKV file with AC3 audio, and that's with a 3.5Ghz six core processor. But the quality loss is minimal. I just run the conversions overnight after ripping the BD to my HDD.

If you just rip the main movie to your HDD, then there are several different programs you could use to reduce the bitrate/size. But it may not be much faster. I'll leave it to others to suggest a few.

And welcome to our forums.

[WillN]

Thank you for your response, redwudz. I want to reduce size from 23 GB plus to about 23 GB which can fit in a single layer BR disk. Could you tell me specifically what programs I can use to reduce the size of the files on my hard drive? In my case, is it faster than that when I use DVDFab?

[fritzi93]

You could try ripping the disc, then run BDRebuilder, automatic settings, one-pass encode to BD25 (single-layer Blu-Ray recordable). Should be significantly faster, but you'd have to try it and see. BDRB is the fastest Blu-Ray to Blu-Ray program I have tried, and I've tried most of them.

The only faster way would be to encode directly from disc, i.e. run DVDFabPasskey or AnyDVDHD in the background and encode without ripping first. That puts unnecessary wear on the reading drive, IMO. As Redwudz says, though, 4 hours isn't that bad considering the processing cycles required.

Quality loss is more of a concern when re-encoding to BD5. Any re-encoding with lossy compression entails quality loss, but there's no way you'll detect it when you re-encode to BD25.

[WillN]

Thank you, fritzi93. I will check out BDRebuilder.