Filter out 'fuzz' during Blu-ray back-up?

[mpalm887]

I'm backing up "Stargate" to MKV and the original Blu-ray isn't the best quality. The actual m2ts file that I'm working with itself has quite a bit of 'fuzz.' Is there a way to smooth that stuff out effectively before or during the x264 encode?

[Baldrick]

Fuzz? or do you mean grain? It should be there!

How do you backup it now? What software? If you use ripbot264 you should be able to add some filter using avisynth.

[mpalm887]

Word Baldrick. It's taken me a little while to learn the in's and out's of RipBot...in fact I'm not anywhere near knowing them ALL yet. But I was able to kind of get the gist of the filter features in the "properties" section under the video side of the "Encoding Settings" screen. I ended up using the "Film" setting for denoise tweak, and then added a tiny bit of brightness and saturation under the colors tweak.

The film looks to be a DVD transfer or something because it's just nothing compared to a modern film on Blu-ray. Mind you it's an old enough film that I'm not complaining.

While I've got you here, can I ask you one more thing?

I'm just setting up another encode in RipBot and it's the movie Hairspray (my wife's).

I found my movie in the "stream" folder, chose my streams (DTS-HD, and H.264/AVC video) to demux and RipBot went to work. Once it was finished I opened up the temp folder to take a look at my streams. I found a

-1.55GB .dts audio stream (I chose DTS-HD so I hope this is it)
-and an 11GB video stream that was an MKV.
-a subtitle stream and a bunch of other random files.

Now the original .m2ts file that RipBot demuxed was 18Gb so I'm wondering: why was the video portion so small? and what was taking up the rest of the 18GB of space? Extra audio streams maybe?

More importantly, since the video file isn't too big anyway, I'd rather just remux the video and audio without reencoding the video again. That way it should just be original quality right? However I DO want to crop out the black lines so that i get just the 2.35:1 video without letterboxing in the frame. Is it possible to do an auto-crop of the black lines without reencoding? Note: I'm not burning in any subs for this one.

Can ripbot do this? or should I use one of the many other MKV tools to just mux the dts stream into the current mkv video stream? Which tool would you use, or which is easiest to use?