Best ripping/converting software (free/paid)?

SomeGuy133

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Hey guys, these are my needs and wanted to know what your thoughts were on whats the best ripping software and encoding software.

Purpose
I am building a NAS/DAS and I want to start ripping my family's DVD/BD collection for use on the network. My goal if I have space is to rip ISO and MKV/other media format but if space is an issue I will rip ISOs and convert to mkv or whatever when i want to use them as media files.

Loosing quality is not an option period. and features are a must like selecting codec/res/size. My dad does a ton of travel as well as my brother. We as a family need the versatility to take our videos with us so a 30-60GB movie does not always work :) I may have a 240GB flash drive able to do 100-160MBps but those are still HUGE files for week long trips sometimes out of the country.

My needs
*must support DVDs and Blu-Rays
*Beat DRM (given)
*no water marks or loss in quality (given)
*create ISOs
*create mkv/other formats at lossless quality and any quality of choice (res/compression/codec/filetype/bit rate/and so on)
*do multiple DVD/BDs at once (I have 3 BD drives)
*Free is preferred but i am willing to buy a software if it adds a much better user interface and features. If 20-50 bucks saves me time and adds useful features its worth it.

Questions and thoughts
Do I need or want CUDA support? I have a 980 TI and an intel i7 4770K I will be getting a better processor soon, either skylake or x99 K/E edition. I have tried make mkv and i can rip in 20-30 mins and i don't see my CPU or GPU phased at all but maybe because it is loseless quality so little encoding is being done??? I also have 3 BD players for ripping so keep that in mind if that can over load the CPU.

Also if I have ISOs on my NAS and want to convert them to losssless or downsized mkv or whatever type do I need cuda support? I wouldn't be limited to the 20-30 mins ripping time since they would be on an HDD or SSD at that point so the BD drive would not be a bottleneck. I remember when I had a 720QM which was good at the time encoding required a ton of CPU but that is like 1/3rd my current CPU and I don't know if some new instructions have made thisCPU/CUDA issue moot now.

I have read and heard of DVD Fab, makeMKV, and handbrake.

I tried to use handbrake but couldn't get it to work. I am probably retarded and need to watch a tutorial on it. I spent 5 mins on trying it out in the middle of the night so yea i have more research to do on that but please enlighten me if you got the time.

I tried makeMKV and it is super basic obviously. It appears to only make loseless which is cool but that's it. It has worked on everything I have tried...aka 2 BDs :) They are brand new ones so it appears to beat the newest or almost nearest DRMs with no issue.

I tried DVDFab when it was in betas like 5 years ago (on that 720qm/260m :D) and it didn't work at all and couldn't beat any DRM even though it was supposed to lol but it was free and in betas so i can't judge it :) It did seem like it had potential though.

Are there any other options? I am sure other media hounds here got some nifty system set up.

Also should this be here or in the optical drive section? Not sure which is best.
 
DVDFab is my goto just finished updating to 9.2.0.5, and I don't know if you knew this but I am pretty sure cuda isn't on the newer cards like kepler. It is now a newer technology called NVENC. but needless to say you will get the best possible speed/quality with the nvidia card encoding it for you with dvdfab. I ripped a full Bluray movie over 2 hours of video and audio in around 45 mins. This was to an MP4 at native res and just a small bump down in bitrate. I will say this though it's not cheap but I will say it's worth it:p
Handbrake wont remove encryption so using it for ripping is a no go. But its one of the best reencoders out there for mp4 and quick as you can be for free...
I use it for making my bluray rips smaller for like my phone and tablet and not take up too much space. It does a great job at that with all the built in profiles.

As far as iso to mp4 or whatever, how are you making the iso. If you are using something like PowerISO and making an image from the disc to iso then that wont work, you need to rip it first from the disc so any encryption is removed and then you can have at making an iso so that you can duplicate the disc later. Handbrake should allow you to open a file and choose the iso and it will scan for video and audio files contained therein. from there you choose a profile you would like to convert it to and finally destination if you want it saved somewhere else and click start and it should use all your processors utilizing them at pretty much 100 percent. I have a i7 4790 and it cranks up the cpu utilization when converting but fortunately it doesn't throttle since I have a pretty good HSF.

BTW the way DVDFab works now, is it kinda like modules. You need to buy each module you intend to use but you can get around that by just buying the bluray ripper or the dvd ripper and then reencoding using handbrake. I last purchased the bluray module for 60 bucks since I didn't have it before. but the website has a discount for 20 percent off all products so that would only be 48 bucks now. You can download a trial and test it out if you like too and see what you would be getting...
 
how is it 45 mins? I ripped an mkv in 20 mins. Hunt for red october BD version which was 37 GB and saw no usage of my CPU or GPU.

For ISO i don't know what i can use thats why i was asking :) not sure what works. Does removing the encryption matter for ISOs if you plan on burning it to a new disc down the road so original stays in good condition or using the ISO to mount in your computer or mounting the ISO so that you can make a media file out of it? I want to retain the original image if possible digitally so if disc dies I cna make new one. Also with ripping mkvs or whatever you can loose clips that are part of special features. It also can make a crap ton of titles....lord of the rings extended edition has so many small parts -_-
 
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Search the forums, So many threads about this posted already.

you know you could make a cool guide that solves this issue instead of posting useless replies. I love great guides. I checked a few out first and thats where i learned about a couple of these programs so by all means make a massive guide on ripping. Make everyone's day or not....
 
The confusion is when people talking about ripping because it has several meanings:

- it can mean simply ripping the content at native size from media to other storage (which is what MakeMKV does)
- it can mean transcoding media content from native size to something smaller in some other type of container (MKV, MP4, etc, are containers - they hold audio/video/caption/etc streams inside a single container, they're not file formats basically which confuses people as well)
- it can mean making a duplicate copy disc to disc of whatever content you're dealing with

and several other things. It sounds like what the OP wants is to take his DVD and Blu-ray collection, transcode it to something smaller to take up less space, and then have it be ready for playback whenever. In order of the "wants" it's like this:

*must support DVDs and Blu-Rays
Then AnyDVD HD is pretty much the only useful solution at this point in time unless you wish to use MakeMKV for everything.

*Beat DRM (given)
AnyDVD HD

*no water marks or loss in quality (given)
AnyDVD HD but realize that with respect to "loss in quality" that means you're going to have to rip the entire content which for Blu-rays can take up a considerable amount of space.

*create ISOs
Once a drive is unlocked (decrypted) you can read the contents using most any ISO creation program (UltraISO, PowerISO, etc) without issues - you have to play a given piece of media first to unlock the drive (the copy protection will prevent direct reading of the media till you play it at least one time in the cycle)

*create mkv/other formats at lossless quality and any quality of choice (res/compression/codec/filetype/bit rate/and so on)
This is where it gets tricky because there are hundreds of methods to do this and again you're stuck on the "lossless quality" aspect so I'm going to tell you a secret to save you and everybody else some time: the content on DVDs and Blu-rays is already lossy to begin with, that's the nature of audio and video compression and there's nothing you can do about it. You can, however, do a transcode to another container and do it well enough that your limited human eyes can't tell a difference for the most part, but in doing so there is and always shall be a loss of quality because as just stated that's how this shit works.

Having said that, the typical methodology is rip the contents of a DVD or Blu-ray to the hard drive or storage using MakeMKV (AnyDVD HD can do this as well, mind you) and then process the resulting MKV file using HandBrake or some other tool designed for compressing. The only way you're going to get decent quality in the resulting encodes is rip the content then transcode later because this process takes time, sometimes a lot of it, per disc to get good results. CUDA and QuickSync are technologies that can dramatically decrease the time required to make a transcode into a smaller file but the visual quality will suffer sometimes just a dramatically.

If you want the best looking transcodes it's going to take time using x264 whether you use HandBrake, or x264 directly from the command line, RipBot264, or something else - x264 encoding for quality takes time, even on the fastest i7 on the market today or tomorrow. That's just the reality of transcoding, period.

*do multiple DVD/BDs at once (I have 3 BD drives)
You could rip 3 discs at one time, sure, it just requires 3 copies of the ripping software being run at the same time, one for each drive. Now, as for transcoding 3 copies at the same time, congrats, you just tripled your encoding time if that's your goal. As noted, transcoding - the actual process of taking a given format and converting it to another one while still maintaining a very high level of visual quality (which is lossy and can't be prevented) is a CPU/RAM chugging process and even the fastest processors today will only get it done so fast. If you were trying to encode 3 discs at the same time it's going to split your processor's capabilities and take 3x as long, seriously. Now if you have 3 complete computers working at the same time, sure it can go faster, but one CPU (even with multiple cores) encoding 3 discs at the same time = 3x as long to process and there's no getting around it.

*Free is preferred but i am willing to buy a software if it adds a much better user interface and features.
MakeMKV is in a perpetual beta and still "free" at this point and updated with some regularity to allow for new copy protection schemes. AnyDVD HD is the best app there is for this type of process but it's expensive - it's $70 a year (not counting the current 20% discount) and that includes updates for one year for new copy protection schemes, bug fixes, etc. That's on the ripping side of things.

On the encoding side, HandBrake is free and probably the best all around tool there is other than the command line x264 encoder which requires you to learn and understand what the given settings are capable of doing. HandBrake is effectively a GUI front end for x264 and makes things a bit easier with the point/click interface and profiles you can select to get excellent results with a minimum of muss and fuss. DVDFab and other tools work in a similar manner but in my experience of using them, their resulting encodes - even with the best possible quality settings - pale in comparison to what HandBrake produces but that's just me and my experience speaking.

There are literally hundreds of "video converters" floating around out there, some are cheap (and I mean in terms of quality) and free of charge, some are commercial products that still produce shitty quality output, and then there's x264 and HandBrake which is free of cost and sits damned near at the top of the pile of crappy "video converters" that are stacked up below it.

It's not a simple process to do what you're hoping to do, it could take weeks if not months to get it all done given the size of your collection so this is a massive undertaking certainly. My best advice is do a lot of research, get AnyDVD HD and MakeMKV (one has a trial verson for 15 days, the other is in perpetual beta as already noted), get HandBrake or whatever tool you want to use for the actual encodes, break out a few DVDs and Blu-rays and do some test encodes and see what you get.

With x264 it's entirely possible to take a 45GB Blu-ray (with just the movie on it) and end up with an 8-10GB MKV that has full multichannel audio as well as a very nicely encoded x264 video stream inside it and your limited human eyes will never be able to tell the difference.

But it takes time to do this, a lot of time, a lot of patience, and a lot of learning or else you're gonna get frustrated and pissed and not necessarily in that order.
 
i know BDs are lossy...a real size would be petabytes for 1080p i bet.

I thought i had this clear but i guess not:

I want to make an ISO as stated but without DRM* so I can reuse it digitally or burn it or encode it. What program can do that or are there none? I hope to do ISO AND mkv/other format. I would like to keep it in both forms but if space is an issue i want to keep an ISO instead. I can always make an MKV "container" or something else at a later time from that ISO...or what's my hope. I can never go back to its original format after its been changed to an mkv container which is why i don't want to simply make mkvs. Also mkvs strip a lot of small clips. I don't want to have to sort through clips or loose clips from them being cut off due to being less than 120 second. I was thinking of making it 30s because i doubt anything useful is less then that and only a few pieces of junk would come through.

*or is the without DRM part pointless because its not an issue? As in, it still acts like it normally would as a disc but its simply an ISO. I don't know if making an ISO is possible with BD movies or if something gets messed up. You said something about must be read first. What does that mean.


I want full quality not lossy...or native if that's what you want to call it for simplicity. I am fine with having 50GB movies and only having it as an ISO and each time i take it somewhere i must convert it to an mkv or mp4.

I am building a 24 bay NAS with 3TB drives. I currently have 14 of them so i got a lot of space to work with. I need it for other things as well but i got a lot of space for a solid ~700-1300 50GB files depending on how many drives i through in and my other needs. (i don't have that many movies FYI :D)

K so handbrake sounds good for transcoding gotcha...depending on what this meant:

HandBrake which is free of cost and sits damned near at the top of the pile of crappy "video converters" that are stacked up below it.

that doesn't sound flattering...does that mean its good or at least just not crap???

You could rip 3 discs at one time, sure, it just requires 3 copies of the ripping software being run at the same time, one for each drive. Now, as for transcoding 3 copies at the same time, congrats, you just tripled your encoding time if that's your goal. As noted, transcoding - the actual process of taking a given format and converting it to another one while still maintaining a very high level of visual quality (which is lossy and can't be prevented) is a CPU/RAM chugging process and even the fastest processors today will only get it done so fast. If you were trying to encode 3 discs at the same time it's going to split your processor's capabilities and take 3x as long, seriously. Now if you have 3 complete computers working at the same time, sure it can go faster, but one CPU (even with multiple cores) encoding 3 discs at the same time = 3x as long to process and there's no getting around it.

is makeMKV transcoding or encoding? because i didn't see a single bit of effort on my computer. I might look into DVDFab because of the GPU acceleration. It would be easy enough but again I don't plan on shrinking their size until I want to take them somewhere like on a trip. I want their native quality on the NAS.

Also can you elaborate the quality degradation more. I can notice poor quality fairly easily and when i took the full mkv size from makeMKV it seemed fine at first glance. How does it loose a lot of quality?
 
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is makeMKV transcoding or encoding? because i didn't see a single bit of effort on my computer.

Makemkv takes the audio and video losslessly and puts them in an MKV container, it doesn't transcode anything. Performance on this depends mostly on disk speed. One dedicated HDD per file transfer should be used for each session that you run. An average SSD can take 2-3 sessions at once. Raid of HDD or SSD can do more, of course.
 
As noted above, all MakeMKV does is decrypt the contents of the media - be it DVD or Blu-ray - and depending on what you've chosen to copy over it will create an MKV container and everything goes inside that container (everything you chose). It can be every single bit of info on the media, it can be just the main movie, it can be the main movie + extra stuff, and so on. MakeMKV is pretty decent in terms of what you can pull from the media but in the long run it's copying the media decrypted in its original format meaning the full size - if it's a main movie that's 35GB on the disc, it'll be 35GB in the hard drive or NAS.

HandBrake is a transcoder which means it takes media you feed to it and compresses it down using x264 (primarily) which is arguably the best encoder for video streams out there today. x265 is the next standard for the future but a) it's still being ratified and will change as time passes and b) it takes a shitload of processing power to create encodes with it. Yes, the space savings with x265 can be considerable (upwards of 50% smaller files with the same apparent visual quality) but again, it takes much MUCH longer to do an encode even with the high end CPUs at this point in time.

My suggestion is this: get off the ISO bandwagon because if you intend to move files to other devices for playback, that's not quite the format you'll want them in. MKV is designed from the gitgo for such purposes, it's pretty much the best all purpose container format that exists today although the MP4 container is more widely used. MKV offers the most potential, basically. If you still want ISOs of your discs, then as I stated in the previous post AnyDVD HD would be the best solution but you're gonna pay for it considerably.

As for the "MKV strips stuff" well, no, it doesn't - it's a container, it will hold whatever the hell you wish to put in it, and again like I said, MakeMKV is a very capable piece of software but most people tend to use it for ripping just the main movie +audio tracks and they don't include everything else on the media. It is entirely possible to rip a DVD or Blu-ray fully - every chapter, every clip, every bit of info - and slap all of it inside an MKV file which when played back will come up just as if you'd started playing the DVD or Blu-ray: it'll have the menus, navigation, all of it, just in a more convenient form on your storage that doesn't require you to keep shuffling out the damned physical discs. You just have to spend time with MakeMKV to realize what it's capable of doing overall.

What I mean by the HandBrake comment is that in my opinion it's the only solution out there - everything else is shit and I've tried over a hundred different "video converter" applications over the years. The one I've always used myself for pretty much all my video encoding needs and recommended above and beyond anything else is HandBrake, plain and simple.

When you used MakeMKV to rip the "full" content of a DVD or Blu-ray you ended up with the bit for bit content on the media inside the MKV it created for you - it's exactly the same. If you understand the concept of lossy compression with an MP3 example - you take the raw audio data on a CD which is quite large, like 50-75MB typical size for a 5 minute son - and then you compress it with the MP3 psychoacoustic compression algorithm you end up (typically) with a file that's 5-8MB in size, almost a 10:1 reduction or compression ratio. x264 can do similar things to video, so again instead of having a huge gigantic massive MKV file in the 30GB or larger size, you can - with the proper settings learned by trial and error - use HandBrake and end up with a visually identical MKV file that is up to 10x smaller.

I can't give you exact numbers because there's just too many damned variables, suffice to say that a lot of people "in the scene" that do HD encodes of Blu-ray content typically agree that for a good/great quality encode it's going to end up roughly 8-12GB in size for a 1080p encode with full audio tracks (5.1 through 7.1, sometimes multiple audio tracks too). That's for Blu-ray media, DVD media which is much lower resolution and much lower quality overall can end up with files 1 to 2GB in size and you won't notice any visual difference instead of them being 5 to 8GB on the media.

It's a fairly complicated thing and really there are no good guides out there - I've been doing this kind of video encoding for a few decades now, and using HandBrake for most of the last 10 years, and it would basically end up being a damned novel of some length to cover all the necessary info to get good results. I'm not saying you can't do it, just saying it's not all that easy IF you intend to use compression.

If you don't give a shit about file sizes, then use MakeMKV and rip to MKV files - full disc media ripping, rip it all into an MKV file and store it on your NAS and that's that. The concept of an ISO is of course possible but that's not really what ISOs were meant for. You can burn an MKV file on a Blu-ray just as easily as burning an ISO, basically. I'm not saying you can't do the ISO thing, I'm saying that for myself I'd avoid it even with all that storage - I'd rip to MKV files and that's it.

If at some point you want or need to convert your movies/MKV files to something smaller for portable use, like on smartphones or tablets, HandBrake can read MKV files just like it was the original media and you can convert/compress/transcode from there and never have to worry about pulling out the original media again - you've already got it on the NAS to work with. You can pick a preset in HandBrake like one for smartphones or whatever and use that and let 'er encode without thinking twice about it. You can even queue up a ton of files and just let it go - of course, as noted again, x264 encoding takes time even on the most powerful machines, and if visual quality is important it'll take longer. High Profile encodes with x264 that get the best quality even on high end quad core machines can still take 1-3 hours per movie but in the long run I suppose it's worth it.
 
so you can make a MKV container of a BD movie with AnyDVD and later on turn it into the EXACT same BD with all the menus/features and stuff? I want/need that ability. And again it takes minutes or less to turn a digital ISO into an MKV lossless container so i that is not an issue as long as I can remake the BD.

It strips out a lot of titles or at least by default and makes separate containers. It removes any title less than 120 seconds and it makes a new mkv container for every single title. I want a single thing that works like a BD as well as a single media file or container. I really could careless about the terms. It is a waste to bicker about them.

I know what lossy and lossless are but you are claiming bit for bit of mkv was not lossless. The BD maybe lossy but the BD to mkv is lossless. You are saying things that are not accurate and can confuse other people. (or at least they come off that way)

The handbrake presets was actually pretty cool and i am definitely looking to into making a few profiles.

Again to clarify, I want to be able to remake the original BD so if mkv can somehow do that please explain because when i did hunt for red october i got 2 media files and its cut out like 30 chunks that were smaller than 120 seconds. I did a BD with a TV series on it and got like 10 mkv files and it cut out like 30 or whatever short clips of something...not sure. Point is they are all separate containers and there is no way of rebuilding that to an orginal disc. I would like to remake the original BD and not some houg poug BD. Thats what I don't get and if its a pure setting issue awesome but I didn't see that in there.
 
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"What we have here, is a failure... to communicate." :D

Not that bad, really, but you're allowing yourself to get hung up on a few terms, ISO and lossless being the two that stand out.

ISO just ends up being a bit-for-bit image of the original optical media, that's it, and yes it can be burned back to media in the future if so desired. Because it's a bit-for-bit image nothing is lost so from a purely technical standpoint you could say it's lossless. Realize that for most discussions with audio or video, whenever people say the word "lossless" or "lossy" it relates to types of compression which is used to shrink or create smaller versions of the media without any noticeable or perceptible quality loss.

MP3 is a form of audio compression that can provide "CD quality" audio at a fraction of the size of the original audio files on a CD; x264 is an encoder that uses the h.264 video coding format to create video streams (it has nothing to do with audio at all) that are, again, compressed and take up much less space than the source material stream while still providing a high level of quality that can border on being imperceptible from the original with the right compression settings.

Your idea of "lossless" means you want what's on the DVD or the Blu-ray to be copied over to the NAS at some point for ease of access and not having to put in the physical media just to watch them from that point on. So for you, "lossless" means you're copying the contents of the discs to the NAS 100%.

I can't make that aspect any clearer than that.

With respect to using HandBrake to compress those very large Blu-ray (and DVD) files, that then becomes another round of lossy encoding hence the vastly smaller file sizes that result after you do an encoding pass with x264 or whatever compression you wish to use.

As far as your idea of the ISO thing again, an MKV can hold everything on a DVD or Blu-ray but no, you can't just convert it into an ISO with a simple click, they don't work quite like that so I suppose my earlier explanation was not very clear. AnyDVD HD can take a Blu-ray and rip it to an ISO without issues - the resulting ISO on the NAS or wherever you intend to put it will be decrypted at that point (this means the ISO you end up with can be played after it's mounted and it won't need decryption - the original Blu-ray physical disc retains encryption because you can't modify the contents).

So, if you had a Blu-ray and you used AnyDVD HD to make an ISO of that Blu-ray on the NAS, yes, at a future time or whenever you could burn that ISO directly back to a blank Blu-ray disc (assuming it's got the capacity to hold it) and it would be a bit-for-bit copy of the original MINUS being encrypted - that's the difference in the process. The original disc, still encrypted - the AnyDVD HD to ISO burned back to a Blu-ray, not encrypted.

I haven't used MakeMKV in some time and I don't own any Blu-rays nor a Blu-ray drive so I can't help there, unfortunately, but it is possible to just rip everything into a single MKV, that much I know for certain because it's one of the most popular reasons why people use that tool in the first place: pop in a disc, rip it all to an MKV, eject, do it again, etc over and over again and wham, suddenly you've got a library of DVD or Blu-ray content in single playable MKV files on storage for a "home theater PC" or something similar.

I'd say make sure to read the user guide for it or the manual or whatever it comes with nowadays, the info is in there someplace.

SomeGuy133 said:
I know what lossy and lossless are but you are claiming bit for bit of mkv was not lossless.

MKV containers are not video files, you're confusing them with other terminology. You can put most any audio and video streams (along with other things like captions, etc) inside an MKV container. When you use MakeMKV to "rip" a disc into an MKV file, it is NOT making a video file; it's making a container holding all the audio/video streams, but the MKV itself is not "a video file." That's a mistake too many people make and it's tough to discern the meaning there. It's a container, nothing more, and it'll hold whatever you want inside it. When you copy the contents of a DVD or a Blu-ray directly into an MKV container then by definition the process is "lossless" because you're not transcoding anything, you're just copying it from the physical disc into a container.
 
Does this make it clear. You have wasted like 2k words for no reason (i am trying to spare you)
dude again i said i know what they are (mp3/mp4/mkv/divx/wave/varible bit rate/lossy/lossless/codecs/formats. You name it I know it. I said its not worth the effort to nit pick....good lord. Its like saying the sky is not actually blue but its appears blue because of blah blah blah...or you can just say its blue and move along
My goal is not to waste your time so i am trying to get you to answer the direct issue and not explain unneeded things.
Again i appreciate your help...just trying to get to the point and not waste time.

your wasting your time describing things i know instead of answering the actual questions.

As far as your idea of the ISO thing again, an MKV can hold everything on a DVD or Blu-ray but no, you can't just convert it into an ISO with a simple click, they don't work quite like that so I suppose my earlier explanation was not very clear. AnyDVD HD can take a Blu-ray and rip it to an ISO without issues - the resulting ISO on the NAS or wherever you intend to put it will be decrypted at that point (this means the ISO you end up with can be played after it's mounted and it won't need decryption - the original Blu-ray physical disc retains encryption because you can't modify the contents).

1.) perfect thank you, thats exactly what i needed to hear.
2.) Is AnyDVD the only option that does that?
3.) That iso I can then later on make an MKV or whatever out of it via mounting in deamon tools or whatever correct? I assume yes but since you appear to know i rather not buy it without being for sure :)

Also you said its like 70 a year or whatever (that is a bit ridiculous especially if lower down question is true). Does the software expire or just the updates? I bet i could slide by for awhile without renewing the software. Also you said that I need a copy of the software for each drive? I can't run multiple drives at once? That's shoddy business if so...talk about greedy. I wonder if VMs could get around that? Can you elaborate please.
 
If you keep it ISO, VLC may be able to play it. I don't have a BD ISO just a DVD ISO and it opened up had a menu and I clicked play and the film started playing.
 
you know you could make a cool guide that solves this issue instead of posting useless replies. I love great guides. I checked a few out first and thats where i learned about a couple of these programs so by all means make a massive guide on ripping. Make everyone's day or not....

Why re-invent the wheel.....it has been done, and posted on here as well.
 
SomeGuy133 said:
your wasting your time describing things i know instead of answering the actual questions.

Well I mean, if you know all this then you'd know the answers are easy to come by. As for my lengthy explanations, I don't do it just for you - the one asking the questions - I provide info so others that come upon the thread might learn something as well. Again, if you know all this stuff then it's simple to go the few more steps to get this stuff done with that knowledge.

AnyDVD HD is the tool I recommend, so you either pay their asking price to play or, do things in a more difficult manner I suppose. I bought a lifetime license years ago and consider it worth the cost even though I don't have any intentions of ever getting Blu-rays, I ain't paying again for movies I already own just 'cause they're encoded in a higher definition, the hell with that.

Once you have the ISO you can do whatever you want with it because it's an image of the DVD or Blu-ray. Burn it, encode it, whatever, the choice is yours.

As for the 3 drive situation, don't quote me on this but AnyDVD HD detects all the optical drives in a system and should work with all of them - by three copies I mean one copy running at one time can't rip 3 discs at the same time as far as I know. Each drive would require its own ripping process so, the only way to know for sure is give it a shot. I did mention that AnyDVD HD has a trial period so, grab it, install it, and see what it's capable of with the hardware you happen to have.

And I never waste words - perhaps you might consider them wasted, but they ain't, I assure you. ;)
 
Well I mean, if you know all this then you'd know the answers are easy to come by. As for my lengthy explanations, I don't do it just for you - the one asking the questions - I provide info so others that come upon the thread might learn something as well. Again, if you know all this stuff then it's simple to go the few more steps to get this stuff done with that knowledge.

AnyDVD HD is the tool I recommend, so you either pay their asking price to play or, do things in a more difficult manner I suppose. I bought a lifetime license years ago and consider it worth the cost even though I don't have any intentions of ever getting Blu-rays, I ain't paying again for movies I already own just 'cause they're encoded in a higher definition, the hell with that.

Once you have the ISO you can do whatever you want with it because it's an image of the DVD or Blu-ray. Burn it, encode it, whatever, the choice is yours.

As for the 3 drive situation, don't quote me on this but AnyDVD HD detects all the optical drives in a system and should work with all of them - by three copies I mean one copy running at one time can't rip 3 discs at the same time as far as I know. Each drive would require its own ripping process so, the only way to know for sure is give it a shot. I did mention that AnyDVD HD has a trial period so, grab it, install it, and see what it's capable of with the hardware you happen to have.

And I never waste words - perhaps you might consider them wasted, but they ain't, I assure you. ;)

alright well thanks. I'll have to give anyDVD a shot i guess. I am surprised so few options exist :/ Glad I posted. I don't remember reading up on that one. I'll have to see how that goes. Thanks again!

When I get some time I'll try to remember to make a sum up on this thread in first post for anyone else.
 
If you go with AnyDVD, which I have been a fan of for the last decade, I use this on Bluray's.BD Rebuilder. Takes them straight to ISO with the option to resize and remove menu's and extras if so inclined.
 
alright so i was looking at anyDVD and supposedly they didn't nickle and dim you for modules but they do now. You have to get cloneDVD and cloneBD with anyDVDHD -_- Or am i missing something. They also don't support h.265 yet or 3D but DVDFab does.

Thoughts?
 
AnyDVD HD isn't a transcoder, it's simple a tool to decrypt the contents of DVD or Blu-ray media and allow for copying - meaning a straight 1 for 1 bit for bit copy - from the media to a storage device. It basically sits between the actual media and any software you choose to use (like HandBrake) that needs to access the contents of the media as it's doing real-time decryption of said contents. That's all it does.

CloneDVD and CloneBD do the same thing but also go a step further and allow you to do compression resulting in smaller file sizes when you're done - it's capable of producing multiple containers (they still call them file formats inaccurately) like AVI, MP4, and MKV and it has presets as well for popular devices like iPhones, iPads, and whatever.

What I will say is this: the quality of the resulting output using CloneDVD or CloneBD will never match what's possible with HandBrake or even the pure x264 command line encoder. There isn't, hasn't, and probably never will be an all-in-one tool to go straight from media to container with the level of quality possible when it's done in a two-step process more often than not (meaning a rip of the media to storage and then transcoding it to a container in a compressed form using x264 either by command line or using HandBrake or RipBot264 or whatever).

As I noted earlier, while h.265 (which is the actual video format) encodes done with x265 (the encoder which creates h.265 compliant video streams) is still being ratified, it's not even close to being finished yet, it won't be for several years more than likely, and it takes roughly twice as long to create an encode using it because of it being so immature right now - if you don't have something like 12 cores with 24 threads of processing power it's going to take a damned long time to encode just one movie from Blu-ray sufficiently. x264 (for creating h.264 video streams) is vastly better, more mature, more stable, and a known entity for many years now and easier to work with as well as being faster overall (at least at this point considering x265 is in progress).

But that's your call in the long run. Try different methods and find something that works best for you as those programs all offer trial periods.
 
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AnyDVD HD isn't a transcoder, it's simple a tool to decrypt the contents of DVD or Blu-ray media and allow for copying - meaning a straight 1 for 1 bit for bit copy - from the media to a storage device. It basically sits between the actual media and any software you choose to use (like HandBrake) that needs to access the contents of the media as it's doing real-time decryption of said contents. That's all it does.

CloneDVD and CloneBD do the same thing but also go a step further and allow you to do compression resulting in smaller file sizes when you're done - it's capable of producing multiple containers (they still call them file formats inaccurately) like AVI, MP4, and MKV and it has presets as well for popular devices like iPhones, iPads, and whatever.

What I will say is this: the quality of the resulting output using CloneDVD or CloneBD will never match what's possible with HandBrake or even the pure x264 command line encoder. There isn't, hasn't, and probably never will be an all-in-one tool to go straight from media to container with the level of quality possible when it's done in a two-step process more often than not (meaning a rip of the media to storage and then transcoding it to a container in a compressed form using x264 either by command line or using HandBrake or RipBot264 or whatever).

As I noted earlier, while h.265 (which is the actual video format) encodes done with x265 (the encoder which creates h.265 compliant video streams) is still be ratified, it's finished yet, it won't be for several years more than likely, and it takes roughly twice as long to create an encode using it because of it being so immature right now - if you don't have something like 12 cores with 24 threads of processing power it's going to take a damned long time to encode just one movie from Blu-ray sufficiently. x264 (for creating h.264 video streams) is vastly better, more mature, more stable, and a known entity for many years now and easier to work with as well as being faster overall (at least at this point considering x265 is in progress).

But that's your call in the long run. Try different methods and find something that works best for you as those programs all offer trial periods.

Ok I am a bit confused. How would I make an ISO then with AnyDVD HD? Use a free 3rd party iso program after I unlock the DVD/BD? According to their site anyDVD HD doesn't make isos...you have to purchase 2 extra programs.

Also is it really only 2x encode time? Thats not that long if it makes the file much smaller. Does the thing work? If it only takes a long time to do it I could care less because I'll just queue it up and come back later especially if its GPU supported. If it shrinks the file better than 264 as in same or better quality but less size i am fine with that. That means I could fit both an ISO and h.265 mkv/mp5 version of it.

Also i am just going to ignore the highlighted part of your post because that makes absolutely no sense. A single process vs a 2 step process in computers can be the exact same thing if made to be that way. I won't bother getting into that but without proof i won't make any opinion if that's even remotely true. If you want to make two exact copies of a BD clip and prove that please be my guess otherwise I am keeping an open mind and taking that with a grain of salt.
 
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As of version 6.4.6.2 from way back in 2008, AnyDVD HD can output as ISO/UDF format using the AnyDVD HD ripper (part of the program).

And yes, x265 these days in its current version(s) tends to take roughly twice as long (and depending on settings, even longer) to create comparable quality output that x264 is capable of. I know one guy with a hex core i7 machine (6 cores, 12 threads) and he used HandBrake (which supports x265 and is updated when newer stable builds of the x265 encoder come out) to encode "The Dark Knight" which is a 2.5 hour long movie to x265 High Profile and it took nearly 7 hours - 7 freakin' hours - and when it was done the resulting MKV was about 5.5GB.

He said it looked worse than the x264 encode he did of the same movie on the same machine with the same install of HandBrake which ended up being 6.9GB and looking vastly superior - that's his opinion, not mine, on the visual quality. The encoding times and results in terms of file size are pretty concrete, however.

As I noted earlier in this thread, the tools are available right now, some of them are totally free, some of them have trial versions - you need to test them out yourself, install the trial versions, do some test encodes and figure out how all this works. The recommendation is to do an encode of just a single chapter of a movie, be it DVD or Blu-ray, instead of potentially wasting hours doing a full movie. Pick some chapter on some disc that you think would be good for a test scenario and encode it using the tools available, if you don't like how it looks alter some of the encoding parameters and do it again and again, as much as needed till you find something you like.

Having said that, I cannot imagine anyone being dissatisfied with ripping a Blu-ray to x264 High Profile (with the preset for it in HandBrake it's easy, just one click and then Start the encode) either in terms of the visual quality or the resulting file size using the defaults the preset uses.

Install some apps, do some test encodes, and take it from there.

2x the encode time = would you rather take 1.5-2 hours to encode a movie or 3-4 or more per movie for only a relatively small decrease in file size knowing that h.265 with the x265 encoder is vastly inefficient in terms of speed and visual quality? That choice is all yours.

My point with the two-step process is this: you can spend a day ripping the media you have to the hard drive (dozens of movies in that time frame of 24 hours, especially if you have 3 optical drives), and from that point you can queue all of those up into HandBrake or whatever tool you plan to use for encoding and then hit Start and come back when it's finished, period.

The one-step method means you have to do the encoding manually per disc while it's in the drive, this takes hours per disc and wastes a lot of time. The two-step method is more efficient: rip multiple pieces of media to your NAS and then encode them in batch from there.

You can't do batch encoding of more than 3 pieces of media at a time with your setup which means you still have to come back every so often and change things out and start it up again. It's far more efficient to copy all that stuff to the storage then batch encode it.

That's my point with the two-step process.
 
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Just as an addon so it's not lost in an edit misread, take a look at this thread here at the forum which has info on x265 vs x264 and what one [H] member has been dealing with (if you haven't read it already, that is):

Just a quick h.265 update

4 hours to create the x264 movie, almost 37 hours to create the x265 version.
 
thanks that makes a lot more sense. Those examples are interesting and I will take that advice and go from there and test out some slides. If I can get good GPU support for h.265. It might be worth it so I can keep both an ISO and active media file but we will see. Alternatively, I do think I might have enough space to rock out an ISO and h.264 with my current collection and needs and a year or so down the road delete the h.264 and replace it with h.265.

I'll let you know over the next few months how this goes and post results.
 
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