Question on Ripping BR movies to ISO

D

Draugauth

Limp Gawd
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Mar 29, 2007
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Since I have my home server setup with future HDDs in mind to increase the size I now want to start converting my BR movies to ISO format for use on the other systems in my place.

This will allow me to store the physical discs someplace safe and free up room as I am currently using 3 bookshelves for movies.

Understand these ISO's will not be leaving the server or be copied to any systems I do not personally own. This is simply to make it easier when I want to watch a movie without having to go through all the discs themselves and to reduce the risk of scratches to the discs (I have had several DVD's ruined from DVD readers crapping out or be bumped).

Thanks in advance!
 
Eh it's late.

First, rip them to your HD using DVDFab HD. You can rip either the whole disk or the main movie, I never care about the extraneous material so I've only used the "Main Movie" feature. Then I highly recommend you run your rips through BD Rebuilder. Your rips will sometimes be more than 40 gigs, which is fine if you have 100 TB of storage you'll get 2500 movies on there. If you don't, rebuilding them to 9 gigs (or even 4.4, standard single-sided DVD) is great for archiving them and I challenge anyone to pick the rebuilt bluray from the original 10 times out of 10. I'm picky as hell and completely gave up on backing up my blurays to BD-Rs after seeing what Rebuilder does with them on it's highest quality settings, now I just use DVDs.

Once complete you'll have a directory with a "BDMV" folder in it. Open that, open the "Stream" folder and you have a .m2ts file that you can play with VLC. If you don't use Rebuilder, the stream folder will sometimes contain a number of m2ts files in which cause you'll likely have to make an ISO, mount it and open that with PowerDVD. Rebuilder will always leave you with a single m2ts.

To make the ISO you can use IMGBurn, use UDF 2.5 format.
 
Fooshnik said:
If you don't, rebuilding them to 9 gigs (or even 4.4, standard single-sided DVD) is great for archiving them and I challenge anyone to pick the rebuilt bluray from the original 10 times out of 10. I'm picky as hell and completely gave up on backing up my blurays to BD-Rs after seeing what Rebuilder does with them on it's highest quality settings, now I just use DVDs.
Click to expand...

This is entirely dependent on your TV screen size. If you have a 30" or so TV you probably won't know the difference. 65"+ and you will.

I can notice the difference on 720P rips vs the native BD 10 times out of 10 on a 92" screen.
 
MakeMKV is your friend provided you only want the movie itself and not all the other menus etc. The biggest plus is that MakeMKV is free whilst in beta (been in beta for ever).

It will make a full resolution, non compressed / non-recoded MKV file that can be played back on anything with enough power to play 1080p video. It also deals with subs (forced) additional audio tracks etc... Best of all, it's so simple to use it's unreal.

I was using AnyDVD HD, eac3to and MKVmerge until I discovered this little gem.
 
Noticing a difference on a 30" screen and a 65"+ screen makes no difference. They are feed the same information.

If your recoding 1080 down to 720, then there is loss, but if you can't see the difference using a 1080 screen and a 1080 source, it won't matter how large the screen is, that is just the limit of using 1080.

For larger screens your just going have to go with 4k, but that isn't currently on blurays.
 
dan87 said:
This is entirely dependent on your TV screen size. If you have a 30" or so TV you probably won't know the difference. 65"+ and you will.
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This. I've done many tests over the years and even shrinking a 30GB source to 9GB, the difference in additional noise and macro blocks in dark scenes or during fast action is VERY noticeable. More importantly, if you're shrinking to 4.5 or 9GB it usually means tossing the lossless HD audio tracks and the audio is where you REALLY notice a difference. In fact to me the preservation of the HD audio track is even more important than the PQ because its not as affected by viewing distance. Even on a $300 Onkyo and el cheapo 5.1 speakers, if you A/B compare the DTS with the DTS-HD track you WILL hear a difference.

65" TV's can be found for $1000-$1200 these days, 80" TV's can be had for like $3500, and 90" just became available, so in a few years time when these are even cheaper and as you continue to upgrade your system, ask yourself if you really want to re-rip dozens or hundreds of blurays when you're staring at an endless stream of macro artifacts, because you wanted to save a few bucks in harddisk space in 2012. Remember to put a value on your time.

I guess everyone has a different tolerance for what's acceptable PQ and AQ and some people are happy watching xvid's with a bag of pork rinds but if you want your BD rips future proof while saving space then rip the main movie and preserve the main HD+core audio track and do not screw with transcoding. BDInfo and TsMuxer are your friends.
 
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Nutnut said:
MakeMKV is your friend provided you only want the movie itself and not all the other menus etc. The biggest plus is that MakeMKV is free whilst in beta (been in beta for ever).

It will make a full resolution, non compressed / non-recoded MKV file that can be played back on anything with enough power to play 1080p video. It also deals with subs (forced) additional audio tracks etc... Best of all, it's so simple to use it's unreal.

I was using AnyDVD HD, eac3to and MKVmerge until I discovered this little gem.
Click to expand...

+1 this is the most elegant simple solution I have run across in making your BD into an uncompressed file that is playable.
 
I am a fan of ISO format, so I typically use DVDFab. It handles everything I could ever need.
 
So both DVDFab and MakeMKV will decode the BR's or will I need some other software as well? Also I am looking at doing the ripping with a Win7 system although I could create a dual boot system again and use linux if that is easier/faster.
 
dan87 said:
I can notice the difference on 720P rips vs the native BD 10 times out of 10 on a 92" screen.
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Anyone can. I never said to reduce the resolution.

One benefit to having Bluray ISOs available is that if you ever want a backup copy of the disk it's a one step process. As for audio, do NOT use anything under 9 gigs if you want to keep the DTS audio stream. Use maybe 9-12 gigs as your file size, or whatever will allow you to maintain a quality viewing experience on your 92" flat panel.
 
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I don't know why everyone hates menus and extras on BRs. It seems to me the industry is massively wasting time & money if no one likes this stuff. Some menus are nice and some extra material is worth watching, despite what some here say.

Me, for movies, I just rip the entire BR to iso. Using AnyDVDHD makes this a smooth, fast, seemless process. Even using MakeMKV takes work when you have to go in a select stuff and deselect other stuff.

For TV, I use MakeMKV and to episodes, since it doesn't seem possible to address the episodes individually as you can with DVDs.

And the notion of packing a BR down to a DVD size is equally nuts. Why buy all of this stuff (huge TV, speakers, and content) and then spent CPU cycles packing it down? Such a massive additional waste of time and energy.

IMO, of course. And I am working my way up to 100TB.
 
The main problem with discs is the stupid warning menus, forced trailers etc. The time to actually watch the movie from putting in the disc is way too long and the industry is shooting themselves in the foot by keeping that crap as consumers inevitably shift to streaming.

The benefit of the disc is quality, as even the high bitrate streams have horrible macroblocking and noise. Even good x264 1080P encodes (10-12GB file size) you can see macroblocking errors on fast/dark scenes.

I would not compress BR images at all personally, storage is cheap enough (finally coming to pre-flood prices) and will continue to drop.
 
How long does it take to rip a whole disc, and how long does it take to rebuild it or resize it? (of course, what CPU do you have as well)
 
AnyDVD HD > rip to iso with speedmenu enabled, save directly to media server. Simple and elegant. 30 - 60 mins depending on the size of the BD. Playback works with any software player or Popcorn Hour, etc.
 
Draugauth said:
So both DVDFab and MakeMKV will decode the BR's or will I need some other software as well? Also I am looking at doing the ripping with a Win7 system although I could create a dual boot system again and use linux if that is easier/faster.
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MakeMKV is all you need. In fact, it even tells you to disable anydvdHD.

Download it and try it. It's free.

Simple steps (From memory)

1. stick BR into drive
2. Fire up MakeMKV
3. Click the 'Open DVD Disk' button (this will scan the disk and show what's on it)
4. Select the movie you want (usually the largest) and the correct audio stream (I use True-HD or DTS-MA) and subs too if you want.
5. Click start.
6. Depending on the movie this takes around 40 mins.

Remember, as it's not recoding anything, speed is largely dependant on the BD drive, HDD etc.
 
AQ_OC said:
And the notion of packing a BR down to a DVD size is equally nuts. Why buy all of this stuff (huge TV, speakers, and content) and then spent CPU cycles packing it down? Such a massive additional waste of time and energy.

IMO, of course. And I am working my way up to 100TB.
Click to expand...
I was skeptical of doing any resizing of a bluray until I saw how well they come out. 95% of people would never notice the difference. I'm not going to use $5 worth of hard drive space, plus perpetual power and array maintenance costs so my wife can watch Water for Elephants once and forget about it. I could back it up to a BD-R for $1. If using computer cycles is a problem, an array of 30-50 disks is going to be a real problem.

As always, each to their own. I used to have a really complex setup but noticed that most people watched the movie once and that was it. It felt like kind of a wasted effort.
 
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