Best way to play Blu-ray rips from a hard drive

[idsane]

Hello all and thank you in advance for any help you may lend. I am just getting into blu-rays. Currently, I have all my DVDs ripped to hard drives in their original format with no conversion. I play them with windows 7 media center and love it. I just ripped one of my first blu-rays and tried to do the same but win7mc does not allow this. The powerdvd 9 software that came with my drive also will not let me play from the hard drive (just the disk). So my questions are:

1) Is there any way to get win7mc to play these ripped blu-rays OR
2) Is there a good player program that doesn't require a ton of customization (I don't want to convert the files to another format)

Thank you

[yoda313]

I don't know of the proper way to play ripped bluray isos. I'm sure there is a way but I don't know of the top of my head. I'd search the forum for playing bluray iso rips.

What you can do if you want to get a more portable form is to convert to h264 in either mkv or mp4 formats. That will be much more straightforward to play in players like mpchc or vlc. However it will take time to do the conversion after you ripped the disc. How much time depends on your computer specs - mainly cpu power.

For question 1 the answer is almost certainly no. Unless there is something you can do with ffdshow to get the regular windows media player to play high def bluray m2ts files - unlikely in my opinion.

2 - as I mentioned you'll have to search for ways to play bluray rips directly. MPchc or vlc would be the first place to start. But you may need to mount them as virtual discs - I'm not sure what programs do that for bluray.

[Kerry56]

Mount the blu ray ISO's in Slysoft's Virtual CloneDrive. It is free to download and use. PowerDVD 9 should be able to play them from there.

Media Player Classic HomeCinema can play the main movie from the mounted ISO also, but if there is an easy way to get to the menu using this player I don't know it.

[idsane]

Thank you for these ideas. I always ripped dvd to their original format and not ISO files. Will there be any difference if I start using ISO files for my blu-ray? If I started doing this for my DVDs also, would win7mc recognize them? I like keeping them in their original format so that it is a widely accepted and universal format. I will try an ISO rip and drive mount software now and hope it works, but also hope that win7mc will add blu-ray format in the future.

[aedipuss]

Thank you for these ideas. I always ripped dvd to their original format and not ISO files. Will there be any difference if I start using ISO files for my blu-ray? If I started doing this for my DVDs also, would win7mc recognize them? I like keeping them in their original format so that it is a widely accepted and universal format. I will try an ISO rip and drive mount software now and hope it works, but also hope that win7mc will add blu-ray format in the future.

an iso is the original format as it's an image of the disc. not sure what you think is?

[festmaster]

Daemon Tools Lite is another free virtual drive that will let you mount ISO files for playing in PowerDVD. It works perfect in my Ion powered netbook for playing Blu-Ray rips.

[fritzi93]

Dunno how you're ripping your discs, but here are a few observations:

1) If you use AnyDVDHD or DVDFabPasskey, they each have a setting for: PowerDVD "virtualdrive detected" workaround. Which will let you play your rips with PowerDVD from mounted ISO image on hard drive.

2) Arcsoft TMT and TME don't have the above problem.

3) If you don't insist on menus, you have more playback options: Rip with whatever and re-encode with BDRB to BD 5/9/25, outputting to MKV file. With MKV you can retain chapter marks, and selectable audio and subtitle streams. That way almost anything can play the files, including MPCHC, et. al. This method gives you control over filesize too, if that is a consideration. I find that re-encoding main movie to BD9 (~8GB) produces a good compromise without affecting quality noticeably.

4) If #3 is too much trouble, rip directly to MKV with MakeMKV. Files will be big.

[yoda313]

an iso is the original format as it's an image of the disc. not sure what you think is?

Maybe the poster hasn't worked with iso's before.

I'm assuming by original format the poster is reffering to the video_ts folders of dvds. The poster probably doesn't realize a iso file just packages the original disc into a single file with nothing altered.

[idsane]

Thank you again for the helpful comments. I am familiar with ISOs, but have never utilized them before b/c my concern mentioned above that media players like windows media center will not recognize them. I tried putting a DVD into ISO last night and win7mc did not see it. Therefore, I kept everything in the full disc format (including video_ts folder) as yoda mentioned.

I did rip one of my blu-rays to ISO last night and downloaded the dvdfab virtual drive (I use dvdfab to rip everything). It actually errored out at 98.5% for some reason, so I copied it to full disc format on the hard drive then turned it into ISO (not sure if this happens to anyone else?). It played perfectly in ISO format with mounted drive and powerdvd9 as my player. I don't use this forum much but when I do always get great advice!

I guess if there is no way to incorporate it into win7mc without converting I will just put everything in ISO and wait for an update. Then I can at least change from ISO to full disc format later if need be. I did look at other programs like TME and TMT as frtiz recommended, but hate paying that much for unitasker software. It would be nice if VLC updated to play blu-ray programs with the menus.

I have heard of the MKV format but never used it. I like to keep everything as original as possible with all menus and full quality, its just my thing and I guess not many people do this. For me, hard drive space is so inexpensive these days so space isn't an issue. I also only watch movies at home and never on a portable player.

If anyone has any other suggestions not mentioned here I would love to hear them. Thank you

[gromittoo]

Hi, I have a simular issue. I have a Hapauge 1212 PVR, and I am trying to make AVCHDs of some TV series. I record MP4 files from the analog outputs of my cable box, and crop them with smart cutter. Since I plan to do a lot of multi-title disks, I need menus.

I plan to use multiAVCHD to tie the menu structure to the cropped .TS files. For some reason, this takes a long time, even though I am not changing the bitrate of the video. I would like to be able to test/tweak the look of my menus before committing them to an ISO or DVD+R disk, or having to rebuild the entire disk with AVCHD.

With regular DVDs, I use RipIt4Me. I like that is saves the raw Video_TS folder. I have a number of tools I can use to remove video that I am not going to watch. I then run FixVTS to remove these videos. This allows more room for the main video so it won't require as much compression. I can play this directory as if it were a DVD, using the Roxio DVD Player software that came with my DVD burner.

The result is a 4 step process:
- Rip video to Hard drive
- Edit tweak menus and remove unwanted video
- Compress to DVD-5
- Burn.

For my AVCHD disks I imagine:
- Record mpeg-4 Video.ts files
- crop unwanted stuff at the beginning and end (oh and commercials) with a frame accurate crop tool.
- Add generate an AVCHD compatible menu structure to include the videos
- Test and tweak menus
- When happy, Burn to DVD-5 or DVD-9 media.

[rbivi11572]

You can use DVDfab Virtual Drive to make a miniso of the original rip, then use any software that will mount an Iso file such as DVDFab Virtual Drive.