Some general questions about blu-ray ripping

[Plecto123]

Hi. I'm thinking of ripping all my blu-ray's to my hard drives, but I'm wondering at what quality this should be done at. I have read some threads regarding this, but I haven't really found a satisfying answer (or perhaps there isn't one). I have ripped my DVD collection in the past and I then did so without lowering the quality of the video, but blu-ray is just so much bigger! I guess I could do the same to my blu-ray collection, but this would be a waste if it wasn't possible to notice the difference in quality from a compressed file. I guess what I'm asking is at what point do one start to notice that a video file is compressed (assuming 1080p here)? I know this will depend on how good your TV or projector is, but surely most people won't see the difference between a 10GB compressed 1080p file and uncompressed blu-ray on your average 46" TV, right? I also know that there is a lot of bias involved here and Im quite interested in HIFI and the insane audiophoolery that it involves, I can only assume that the same goes for video. So, has there been done any ABX "blind" trials regarding video quality? How expensive of a TV do you need to actually get the benefits from watching a completely uncompressed blu-ray movie?

I also have a quick question about computer hardware and blu-ray ripping. Is this a job for the CPU alone or will upgrading your graphics card decrease the time it takes to rip a blu-ray? I have a Intel Core i5 3570K @ 3.40GHz, would I perhaps wan't to overclock this as much as possible to reduce the time it takes to rip the movies?

[Cornucopia]

Before you go any further, you need to stop and explain to us (and likely to yourself) WHY you are doing this.
For what purpose(s) / target(s)?

That will determine your process.

Scott

[Plecto123]

I'm doing it in order to watch them from my computer rather than from my disc's. Easier, faster, neater, less tare on the disc's etc. etc.

[Kerry56]

Whether you compress your blu ray videos depends on a lot of different factors, some of which are so subjective, we won't be able to advise you. I for one, cannot see much, if any difference in blu ray video that is compressed to fit onto a 25gb target (single layer blank blu ray). The actual size of the video is usually around 23gb. But other people must have much better eyesight, as they claim they can see some undesirable changes when doing even this amount of compression. Where you will wind up in that discussion is beyond our ability to predict.

It helps to have a large screen that is properly calibrated too.

If you want to compress, I'd recommend using BD Rebuilder. You can make movie only, or full backups with it after you decrypt the movies. BD Rebuilder has no built in decryption. I'd recommend using AnyDVD HD as your decryption program if you haven't already purchased something else. It is possible to use free tools for decryption also...there is a free section within DVDFab that will work after the trial ends for the commercial part. And MakeMKV can also rip the entire blu ray to the hard drive for you using the Backup mode.

BD Rebuilder uses the X264 encoder, so it relies primarily on the speed of your cpu. Your i5 3570k is the same processor that I have, and I find it takes between four and six and a half hours to compress an average sized blu ray down to 23gb. I do main movie backups and keep them on hard drives in my HTPC, and on burned blu ray discs.

Some blu ray movies are comparatively small, so you could use Clown BD to extract the main movie once you have decrypted it, and save yourself some time and effort in compression.

[fritzi93]

Another alternative is to use quality based encoding. Output size will be unpredictable, but you avoid excess quality loss for movies that won't compress easily, like with a grainy source. Likewise you won't use too much bitrate when not needed, like for very clean animation.

If you use RipBot, you can try a quality level of, say CRF20 or CRF18 and see which one is good enough, for you. Going lower than 16 yields no improvement over CRF16, while anything over 22 is not adequate for a TV/monitor of any size, IMO. Any re-encode with a lossy codec entails quality loss, however slight. But if you do it right, you can save space with no noticeable quality loss (depending on your display, your eyesight, etc, etc.).

If you want to watch your movies from your computer, it would be convenient to output to MKV. With RipBot, you can get movie only with original chapter timings and selectable subs if you want them. BDRB can also use quality based encoding and output to MKV, though IIRC, it won't preserve chapter timings or subs. BDRB is somewhat easier to use.

If file size is of no concern, use MakeMKV, which will not re-encode, but simply put the movie in MKV container.

[Plecto123]

Thank you for some great reply's I have my movie collection on my main computer, but I have a HTPC in the basement and I often connect my laptop to the TV in the living room so the files can't be so big that they won't play across the network. I don't have that fancy equipment in my house. There's a 46" samsung (of the cheapest kind) in the living room and I have a 27" samsung as a computer monitor. The projector I have in the basement is really shitty, but then again I have full surround with some pretty decent speakers and sub woofer.

How is Pavtube Blu-ray Ripper? Some site I read gave it #1 saying it was really good and easy to use. I just want a MKV file with surround sound and subtitles, don't need the extra material or chapter selection or anything like that.

I have downloaded some movies in the past where they actually manage to get a full 1080p movie into a 1.5GB file I can't really complain when watching this on my 27" monitor. This is the reason why I think not compressing the movie would be a waste of space, what if I am to compress the average movie down to around 5GB, but without compressing the sound? Would many of you have your jaw drop down while rolling your eyes at something like that?

[Steve(MS)]

I am not going to take time right now to answer all your questions but just a few at this point and allow others to fill in.

No to pavtube, at least I haven't seen much support of it here in this forum.

There are 3 recommended here for copying over to hard drive, dvdfab...if you want free, get dvd fab decrypter.
Anydvd and MakeMkv.
MakeMkv is supposed to be free in beta stage.
I have recently discovered dvdfab (not dvdfab decrypter) isn't free to copy...it throws up a dialog box wanting one to buy it.
That may depend on how new the title is, ATP, I am not sure.
Anydvd is trialware so one can try it for a time.

About the 5 GB size, that is insane not think you will not lose audio resolution, not to mention video.
Why anyone wants to downsize a blu-ray to that level is a mystery to me.

Why not just copy over to hard drive, keeping full video resolution and perhaps downgrade audio to play with whatever
media player you are going to use since hard drives are relatively cheap?

For me, I keep both video and audio at 100%...straight copy to hard drives and allow media player(s) handle the audio.
That way I don't have to spend endless hours re-encoding, working on the files....but to each his own....

[yoda313]

Why anyone wants to downsize a blu-ray to that level is a mystery to me.

Obviously to save space - either for burning to disc or simply to not crowd a harddrive.

For me, I keep both video and audio at 100%...straight copy to hard drives and allow media player(s) handle the audio.
That way I don't have to spend endless hours re-encoding, working on the files....but to each his own....

In all honesty this is the best approach these days. With tb harddrives readily available and very affordable the need to compress really isn't there anymore. Edit - though I do convert dts-ma to ac3 for two reasons - to save a bit of space and my sony bluray player doesn't seem to play the dts core over usb - but ac3 640kpbs is fine for me - I don't have a hdmi hd audio amp fyi.

Unless you are going to playback on a tablet that is. Than a conversion would be necessary. But if you are at home you can simply stream it with playon or tversity. You could still stream if you have 3g or 4g on your tablet and you are away from home.

[Plecto123]

The reason I'm thinking about compressing is to save space and to have them easier to handle. I'm also worried about how big of a video file I can stream over my wireless network without it being a problem.

[yoda313]

The reason I'm thinking about compressing is to save space and to have them easier to handle. I'm also worried about how big of a video file I can stream over my wireless network without it being a problem.

Get a wireless N network and you should be fine. You should check to see if it can handle 300mpbs.

Also if you have a G device that can't be upgraded externally you can get the netgear wifi n universal adapter. It plugs into the lan port and turns it into a wifi n unit. I'm not sure if its only 150 or 300.

I have one on my bluray player that is lan only and it streams 1080p from vudu hd perfectly (well most of the time so long as my net connection isn't acting up).

[Elterrible]

Yes to Pavtube! It makes the whole process 10x easier than using all the free tools.

Also, get a GT640 or above video card because Pavtube can rip a 3 Hour 1080P movie in about an hour on the machine I have and that's ripped straight to MP4 H.264 format.

It also has a database and a tool called BD Breaker that cracks the key of Bluray Discs and uploads it to their database so most codes are current.

I think Pavtube has messed up on me twice in the past year and I find that I can rip BDs down to 8 or 9 Gig that look very good for my own personal use. No, I don't need the best as long as compression artifacts aren't present.

As for streaming, I have NAS that is plugged in to the router and I can stream 1080P wirelessly from that device without a bit of slowdown.

[hello_hello]

In my opinion the majority of Bluray video can be reduced to 720p without losing much fine picture detail, if any. My method.....

I rip Bluray video with MeGUI's HD Streams Extractor (under the Tools menu) while AnyDVD runs in the background doing the decrypting. I then open the "ripped" MKV containing the original video using MeGUI and create a few AVISynth scripts for comparison before encoding (MeGUI creates them for you). Generally it's one script which doesn't resize, one which does, and if the video is particularly noisy I create the same two scripts again with some mild de-noising included (mostly I use fluxsmooth, which is the noise filter MeGUI adds to a script when you select "Medium noise" in the Script Creator window).

With up to four scripts created, I then open each with MPC-HC along with the original video (four of five instances of MPC-HC running), display them on the TV maximised, and switch between them. Whichever script produces the picture which looks best to me is the one I use for the actual encoding. More often than not there's very little difference between them and I've got to be sitting pretty close to my 51" Plasma to see the difference anyway. Noise filtering can remove some very fine detail, but it also makes the video easier to compress.

Once I've picked the script to use I encode using the x264 encoder. Generally I use Preset Slow, Tune Film, and a CRF value of 18 for 720p. For 1080p I use the same settings except for the CRF value, when I generally use 20.

If I had to make a very rough guess, the average 720p movie encode would end up at around 3.5GB. 1080p would maybe end up averaging about 6GB. To that you'd also need to add the audio.... anywhere between 300MB to 1GB or more depending on whether you keep the original audio or convert it etc.

If you resize to 720p, how much detail the encode might appear to lose can also depend on the resizing method used when resizing it to fullscreen on playback. MPC-HC offers a few resizing choices. Bilinear (softer) resizing can often make a 720p encode look as though it's lost a very small amount of fine detail when compared to the original video, but to my eyes Bicubic (sharper) resizing can sometimes make a 720p encode look as though it has a fraction more detail than the original (even though obviously it can't) so the resizing method used on playback can play a part. Once again though, if the quality of the encode is high, any minor "detail" differences aren't anything you'd probably see unless you were sitting very close to the screen. Back at normal viewing distance you could probably resize to 720p, apply some noise filtering, resize back to 1080p using a soft resizer after encoding, and still not see any difference between the encoded version and the original 1080p video..... 99% of the time.... in my opinion.

[eddie200112]

OK if I use BD rebuilder and have it back up only the movie with the audio track I select and tell it to make the backup for a 50GB disc. Does that mean the movie only backup it makes will be lossless and uncompressed? Also would I then be able to just use that .m2ts file by itself to store my movies on my drives or does it need the file structure.

In total my plan is to backup all my blu-rays to my media center. Kind of trying to do what dvdshrink did for dvds, but for blu-ray. I just want the movies but at no loss of quality and I want to be able to play them simply over my network. so a single file would be ideal. I know about .mkv but im afraid it wont be supported mainstream for long etc etc. so a file format that is more standard maybe. Id like to save some storage space but not so important to override image quality.
Thanks!

[tarzan54]

If you want to do movie only without any lossless or uncompressed just rip movie only to hard drive with DVDFab then there is no need to use BD Rebuilder, You will also have a folder for that movie that will contain 2 folders inside called BDMV & Certificate, The only time I use BD Rebuilder is to shrink a movie down to fit on a 25GB disk.

[Kerry56]

If you have something that can play an m2ts file by itself, then you can use the one out of the Stream folder that BD Rebuilder makes. You don't necessarily have to have the entire Blu-ray video structure on a movie only backup. Setting output for ~50gb output should keep it from re-encoding the video, though you can also put this line in the ini/configuration file, FORCE_NOENCODE=1. That will guarantee that the video isn't encoded again.

Another way of doing this is to use ClownBD. You'll need something to break encryption, like AnyDVD HD running in the background.

I wouldn't worry about mkv vanishing. It is going to get more popular. MP4 could also work, and is widely supported.

[eddie200112]

OK I should have stated I already have anydvd hd, also I don't want to have to pay for dvdfab after the trial..

[tarzan54]

Forgot to mention AnyDVD which is an excellent choice also.

[eddie200112]

Can anydvd extract just the video from a bluray? currently I just rip the whole disc to an iso and store on my hard drives.

[Kerry56]

No, AnyDVD HD's built in ripper can rip the entire movie to the hard drive as files or as an ISO. It won't choose the main movie only.

Which is why I recommended ClownBD, which will select the main movie. It will not re-encode video, since it has no encoder for that. And you can select the audio you want. It is possible to change audio format in ClownBD, but there is also an option to let it pass through untouched.

Output from ClownBD will be a ts file, m2ts or entire Blu-ray video structure.

[eddie200112]

Do you know of a good easy to follow tutorial on how to use bd clown to make a lossless backup from an iso to a .m2ts file.

[fritzi93]

The only guide I know of for Clown_BD is on the tool page for it, partway down. (click the link). It's very simple to use.

[tarzan54]

Never tried Clown_BD, That's why I just use DVDFab, Sometimes I do use tsMuxeR to extract the main movie only after I rip movie to hard drive, Just another suggestion.