Once your Blu-Ray is ripped, will it play on WDTV?

[siratfus]

Much like when you rip a dvd, the vob file is ready to play on your pc or media player. Do Blu Rays work the same way? I understand the file structure and extensions are different, but once ripped via anydvd Hd, will it play if I have the proper software? Or, is there something else that must be done. I'm asking because I'm new to blu-rays. I read the forum articles and see words like rebuilder and remuxer and it feels like I'm walking into a middle of a conversation that may be unnecessary for what i want to do. All i want to do is rip my blu-rays to hard drive and play it with my WDTV. So my question is, once ripped via anydvd hd, is there anything else I need to do?

[lordsmurf]

I've not had much success playing the M2TS files in a player -- it either comes out jerky, or the audio is out of sync. The Blu-ray itself works better. I can only assume hardware assist is involved with the BD, but not for the software player.

[yoda313]

All i want to do is rip my blu-rays to hard drive and play it with my WDTV. So my question is, once ripped via anydvd hd, is there anything else I need to do?

Converting to mkv with ripbot264 is a good way to go for bluray rips.

You can try to leave the original uncompressed file and play on the wdtv however I don't see the benefit of having 20+gb on a harddrive when you can compress to 8gb or so and have comparable quality.

I forgot the method I had but I think it involved tsmuxer to get the video to play on the wdtv without converting. However my issue was I don't have a hdmi amplifier so some of the audio didn't work right without being in ac3/dts normal format. THe high def stuff didn't passthrough properly. Hence the need to convert in my case.

But you should be able to do just fine with ripbot264 and convert to mkv. YOu should note that at least on my dual core 2.7ghz amd processor it took over twenty minutes just to open the main movie stream to begin the compression selection screen. So don't automaticaly assume the program has hung if nothing is happening. It takes a lot of horsepower to open high def video from a bluray rip. It should be a lot quicker if you have a quad core cpu or an overclocked dual core.

Oh and fyi the conversion time for bluray to mkv on my dual core 2.7ghz was about 16 hours using 720p and a locked file size of around 7gb if I remember correctly. So it won't be a speedy conversion either - unless again you have a quad core.

Edit - If you haven't seen it yet here is a massive nearly 500 post thread on the wdtv:

https://forum.videohelp.com/topic358929.html

[Reelman472]

Siratfus,

A bluray rip plays perfectly fine on WDTV. Picture quality remains the same. However you must convert the sound because WDTV won't recognize True HD sound. DTS is fine if your piping it throught a receiver that decodes DTS otherwise use AC3. Ripping a bluray disk is not the same as dvd. Rip to M2TS file with no compression. I use AnyDVDHD to rip to harddrive, BDinfo to find the right track, and tsMuxerGui to convert. Takes about an hour - hour and half depending on your system.

Reelman

[bmo]

You could also use ClownBD in conjunction with AnyDVD HD to rip your Blu-Rays. It won't re-encode the video or anything and it will downconvert the audio to AC3 or DTS on the fly so you'll have a perfectly compatible file to play on the WDTV. It will save you a lot of time as well since you can do all the above in one go.

[siratfus]

Thanks for all the advice guys! I think I'm going to wait it out longer and just stick to my blu-ray discs. It seems we're still sort of in the infant stage.

[yoda313]

Thanks for all the advice guys! I think I'm going to wait it out longer and just stick to my blu-ray discs. It seems we're still sort of in the infant stage.

Well not exactly. You have to have patience and a will to learn.

It's not to the ease of dvd backups yet. That will come soon enough.

But if you have a free afternoon some weekend why not take the plunge and take some of the suggestions we've given here? Nothing to lose but time and harddrive space! Plus it is extremely gratifying when it actually works when you completed the project.

But it does take a lot of effort initially to get the sequences right.

[Supreme2k]

Thanks for all the advice guys! I think I'm going to wait it out longer and just stick to my blu-ray discs. It seems we're still sort of in the infant stage.

I don't see something that has been dumbed down to a two-step process as "in the infant stage". Bluray ripping and converting (or not) is almost in the passé phase.

yoda's method is pretty much spot on. You can shrink down to (more than) acceptable results, load a ton of movies on a hdd, and put the discs in the attic.

[siratfus]

Okay, my first attempt!! Demux, remux, tmux, I'm not sure what all this means.

All I did was ripped my copy of Lost Boys (full disk) onto hard drive and did nothing to it. I simply used WDTV and clicked on the first m2ts file in the STREAM folder and the movie played fine.

However, I did not get the same successful result with 5th Element. Once again, I ripped the FULL DISK onto hard drive. Used my WDTV to click on first m2ts file in STREAM folder and the movie plays fine. Accept I get unsupported audio, my only other audio choice is French and it plays fine.

In both scenarios, WDTV says no subtitles. I'm not sure why, I did a full rip, so I know there are subtitles.

Should I be looking into "muxing" whatever that means? Would learning how to mux help me get the audio and subtitles to play correctly? I guess it also depends on the WDTV's capabilities also, huh?

[mknorr]

Siratfus,

A bluray rip plays perfectly fine on WDTV. Picture quality remains the same. However you must convert the sound because WDTV won't recognize True HD sound. DTS is fine if your piping it throught a receiver that decodes DTS otherwise use AC3. Ripping a bluray disk is not the same as dvd. Rip to M2TS file with no compression. I use AnyDVDHD to rip to harddrive, BDinfo to find the right track, and tsMuxerGui to convert. Takes about an hour - hour and half depending on your system.

Reelman

I just tried that BDinfo program and it gives me information that requires a degree to figure out. Isn't it far simpler to just copy the largest M2TS file to your hard drive.
Are the audio tracks not part of the M2TS? If not, where are they on a BD? All very confusing for me. I agree with siratfus. It sure would be great if someone just made a propper ripping program. You know, I put my BD in the drive and WDTV starts up and automatically rips the movie to my HD.


BTW people here seem to say 'rip' when it should be 'copy'. My understanding of ripping was what happens when you copy a CD to itunes or similar. The files are actually compressed in the process. Merely copying an M2TS from a BD to HD is not ripping in my understanding.

[redwudz]

I've always defined 'ripping' as copying the disc directly to the PC hard drive. Anything else is re-encoding or converting.

The largest .m2ts file is not always the main movie. It could be split among several .m2ts files or the largest may be the directors comments or other stuff, or be a different version, theatrical or unrated. BDinfo would show you which one is the first play file.

A .m2ts file contains the video, several different audio formats and several different languages, along with the subtitles. Open one of the .m2ts files in tsMuxeR and you will see all the files listed.

I use Ripbot after ripping the entire BD to my hard drive, then I convert to a two pass MKV, 8GB in size. Most times it also has the AC3 audio on it. This takes about six hours with the PC in my computer details. The MKVs play back fine with my WDTV.

[cal_tony]

I've ripped some of my Blurays W/O conversion to hard disks. I've used all the available ripping programs with success including DumpHD which did take some time to set up. Mostly, I use MakeMKV. It will in many cases put together multiple M2TS files into the proper order and place them into 1 file. It is also very good at selecting movie only and preferred audio. I have had no problems with either my WD or Seagate players playing M2TS, TS or MKV files. Even though the subtitles are still present in MKV files, they don't seem to play on my players. However, if I take the MKV and change it over to a (M2)or TS file, the subtitles will play. Strangely, in converting a DVD to MKV, that MKV file will play with subtitles. Another thing I've noticed in playing the HD files back on my players is the ability of the player to select chapters. TS files play with subtitles but no chapters. MKVs play with chapters but no subtitles.

Tony

[lowellriggsiam]

I've made a couple of MKVs and BDISO's and they played just as well on both my WDMP and my Seagate FreeAgent Home Theater +.

[jg0001]

I have used AnyDVDHD for some time now and with the CURRENT releases of VLC and MPC, I can play the main movie files (.m2ts) just fine. I find the current version of Media Player Classic does a better job at playback than VLC, but VLC currently better supports the fancier audio formats. I see no need to convert the files, especially given their size.

[jg0001]

Your unsupported audio issue has to do with the fact that the main ENGLISH audio may be in one of the newer formats that not all players can handle (DolbyDigitalTrueHD, DTS-HD, etc). You may find that the player then defaults to a French or Spanish track in 5.1, because those are the next audio tracks in the file, and they are in old school Dolby5.1. As someone else mentioned, you have two choices here. Convert down the English audio track to a format your device can handle or hope your device gets a firmware update to handle the new format. I imagine within a year or so, the two main new audio formats will be easily handled and no longer an issue (which is why I have no intention of transcoding any audio tracks right now).

[FTW]

also, keep in mind that if you're going to encode your BR rips into MKVs (or whatever) and keep the frame size at 1920x1080, there is a limit to the number of R-frames that the WDTV will support (and B-frames also for that matter). for 1920x1080 vids, I believe the number of supported R-frames is 5. any more than that and playback will be corrupted and unwatchable. but search on google & double check

[Darrin]

The method I use works fine for me and the .m2ts files play fine on my wdtv live hub and the live plus.
Ac3 or dts audio
My primary tool is DVD Fab
You can copy the whole disc to your drive or just the main movie.
Or you can use the rip feature and rip the main movie to an .m2ts file, this is the best way because some blurays
have the movie split into differant clips.
Select the m2ts passthrough so it is not transcoded. You can also rip it to an mkv file using the same method.
Very simple, pop your bd in the drive,
luanch the program,
select bluray rip,
select the format - in this case .m2ts,
select edit next to where it says profile and select .m2ts passthough
click go and boom its done.
"If the movie has true hd select remove hd audio."