Some advice on ripping TV series from Blu Ray

[strontium_99]

Hi there. I'm after some general advise please. First off can I just say I am ripping my own Blu Ray discs for 3 reasons:
1) To save on space and not have discs all over the place.
2) For convenience.
3) To downsize from 1080p to 720p which plays better on my setup.

I'm after a simple method of ripping individual TV show episodes off Blu Ray to 720p .mvk format.
At the moment to rip my movies I use DVDFab to do the ripping and then re-encode them using VidCoder, which works well for me. I know I could use DVDFab to do the encoding as well, but for some reason I prefer VidCoder.

But I have a few problems when it comes to TV show blu rays.
First problem is trying to tell which title is an episode and which episode is which in the running order. Can I get that information from any of the files in the blu ray file structure?

Second, the same method I use for my movies doesn't always work for TV show blu rays. I rip the whole disc using DVD fab, and VidCoder (and HandBrake which I've also tried), doesn't find any titles that are long enough to be any of the TV episodes? How come?

Like I say, simplicity is the name of the game here. Can anybody give me some pointers please?

Big thanks,

S

[hello_hello]

Give this a spin: http://www.digital-digest.com/software/HD_DVD_Blu-Ray_Stream_Extractor.html

It's a GUI for eac3to. I'm not 100% sure it includes eac3to, so you may have to download it separately.
HD Streams Extractor is intergrated into MeGUI so I often use it when converting Bluray movies. My method is to to run AnyDVD in the background, open the largest m2ts file on the disc, and then extract just the movie video and desired audio track. It seems to save some time compared to ripping the entire disc.

While I've never encoded an episodic Bluray disc, according to the features list:
"can list available titles of Blu-Ray and HD DVD discs"
So I'd assume it can also rip them individually...... sorry if it turns out it doesn't.

The DVDFab video converter doesn't have a very good reputation when it comes to quality. Ripping is fine, but converting using something else is a good idea.

[strontium_99]

Thanks. I'll check it out.

[fritzi93]

I've used Clown_BD (another eac3to GUI) for extracting individual episodes from BDs. One step if running a driver-level decrypter like AnyDVDHD or DVDFabPasskey in the background.

After a quick analysis pass, you're presented with a list of titles, sorted by run time. It's not a big deal to have a quick look after extraction at the result for the purpose of identification. Or run BDinfo before anything else to view a list of the titlesets and then identify each one by loading the *.mpls in, say, MPCHC.

From there, you can use BDRB to produce a constant quality 720p MKV using Alternate Output settings. Or RipBot, which is what I've been using for making MKVs.

There are any number of ways to skin this cat. Good luck.

[strontium_99]

Nice one. I'll have a play. Thanks for the advise.