Ripping Blu Rays

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PolygonGTC

[H]ard|Gawd
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I'm trying to rip my own Blu Rays but I need to find a program to rip them. I've been using DVD Decrypter for my DVDs but it won't work with BDs. I am encoding using Handbrake and I would like something simple and easy to use like DVD Decrypter if such a think exists.

So, what are you guys using to rip?
 
Everything you wanted to know about ripping blu rays: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1033822

what I do:
anydvdhd is installed.
rip with eac3to and the hdbrstreamextractor gui, I take the HD audio to lossless flac
check for forced subs
merge with mkvmerge

There is a gui called anothereacgui that automates this process with a few clicks.

Sometimes I will use handbrake to re-encode and build the forced subs directly into the image(if they exist). Then no need for vsfilter(which also breaks hardware acceleration in media center)

That thread has a good guide on the first page and throughout it every method of ripping bluray is discussed.
 
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neurobash said:
anydvd + ripbot264
Click to expand...

That's actually what I'm trying right now. If I wanted to use Handbrake to encode is there a way to have Ripbot simply rip the file without encoding it?

Archer75 said:
Everything you wanted to know about ripping blu rays: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1033822

what I do:
anydvdhd is installed.
rip with eac3to and the hdbrstreamextractor gui, I take the HD audio to lossless flac
check for forced subs
merge with mkvmerge

There is a gui called anothereacgui that automates this process with a few clicks.

Sometimes I will use handbrake to re-encode and build the forced subs directly into the image(if they exist). Then no need for vsfilter(which also breaks hardware acceleration in media center)

That thread has a good guide on the first page and throughout it every method of ripping bluray is discussed.
Click to expand...

Nothing I'm ripping will have subs, at least not yet. I'll read through that guide. Perhaps what I'm looking for is there.
 
PolygonGTC said:
That's actually what I'm trying right now. If I wanted to use Handbrake to encode is there a way to have Ripbot simply rip the file without encoding it?
Click to expand...

In that case just rip with eac3to and give the video file to handbrake to re-encode. The use mkvmerge to combine the re-encoded video with the audio.
 
Well, wait a minute here. I just noticed that these are just transport streams. Shouldn't I just be able to copy them from the BD to my HDD and then encode them with HB?
 
PolygonGTC said:
Well, wait a minute here. I just noticed that these are just transport streams. Shouldn't I just be able to copy them from the BD to my HDD and then encode them with HB?
Click to expand...

That's essentially what you are doing when you rip it. Copying it to the hard drive.

And then there's the audio. Not everyone can play the HD audio. Some may rip the HD audio to have it but only play the core. Some disregard that completely. Others like myself reencode the HD audio to lossless FLAC, gives you all the audio with none of the hassle.
Not everyone has the ability to playback 7.1 LPCM. So it all depends.

That thread and the people there can answer all your questions.
 
Archer75 said:
That's essentially what you are doing when you rip it. Copying it to the hard drive.

And then there's the audio. Not everyone can play the HD audio. Some may rip the HD audio to have it but only play the core. Some disregard that completely. Others like myself reencode the HD audio to lossless FLAC, gives you all the audio with none of the hassle.
Not everyone has the ability to playback 7.1 LPCM. So it all depends.

That thread and the people there can answer all your questions.
Click to expand...

Ah, good point. I'm going to give Eac3to with Another eac3to GUI next. Handbrake just crashed trying that anyhow. Thanks for the link to that thread.
 
If you want to use handbrake ( I use it too).

AnyDVD HD > MakeMKV > Handbrake.

I use the high profile settings for blu-ray and DVD and it gives excellent results, though it is a lossy encode I prefer it because the resulting file plays on all my devices (Computer, PS3, Blackberry) and doesn't eat up a lot of space.
 
Are there any encoding programs that support using your video card to encode?
 
devman said:
If you want to use handbrake ( I use it too).

AnyDVD HD > MakeMKV > Handbrake.

I use the high profile settings for blu-ray and DVD and it gives excellent results, though it is a lossy encode I prefer it because the resulting file plays on all my devices (Computer, PS3, Blackberry) and doesn't eat up a lot of space.
Click to expand...

I ended up using RipBot264 and I think I might have it where I want, just waiting for this latest encode to finish as I'm playing around with the noise removal. Handbrake just keeps crashing on my when I try to do high profile with a BD but RipBot264 works fine.

JohnleMVP said:
Are there any encoding programs that support using your video card to encode?
Click to expand...

Nobody makes one that I know of. I've heard of a transcoder in development but I've not heard of anything out.
 
PolygonGTC said:
I ended up using RipBot264 and I think I might have it where I want, just waiting for this latest encode to finish as I'm playing around with the noise removal. Handbrake just keeps crashing on my when I try to do high profile with a BD but RipBot264 works fine
Click to expand...

Use the latest snapshot build of handbrake and the crashing goes away.

One of the issues with ripbot(not an issue if you don't care) is that it can't rip the HD audio. It can reencode it to lossless FLAC but it will only do so at 16bit. This is likely not an issue for the vast majority of people. But I thought i'd point it out.
It can of course rip the Dolby Digital or DTS tracks but half the reason of going to bluray is the audio(IMO).

I was having issues with the latest ripbot taking 3 times longer than the previous version, video that looked horrible and file sizes that were larger than the original. All using the same settings I was using on the previous version. That's when I switched to handbrake for my re-encodes and it's been working great with better video quality.
 
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Archer75 said:
Use the latest snapshot build of handbrake and the crashing goes away.

One of the issues with ripbot(not an issue if you don't care) is that it can't rip the HD audio. It can reencode it to lossless FLAC but it will only do so at 16bit. This is likely not an issue for the vast majority of people. But I thought i'd point it out.
It can of course rip the Dolby Digital or DTS tracks but half the reason of going to bluray is the audio(IMO).

I was having issues with the latest ripbot taking 3 times longer than the previous version, video that looked horrible and file sizes that were larger than the original. All using the same settings I was using on the previous version. That's when I switched to handbrake for my re-encodes and it's been working great with better video quality.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I noticed that. Thankfully I'm only ripping my TV shows which I'm fine with the older lossy 5.1 standards. When I switch over to movies I'll have to move to something else.
 
PolygonGTC said:
I ended up using RipBot264 and I think I might have it where I want, just waiting for this latest encode to finish as I'm playing around with the noise removal. Handbrake just keeps crashing on my when I try to do high profile with a BD but RipBot264 works fine.
Click to expand...

I was having issues with Handbrake as well that is why I turn it in to a mkv first with MakeMKV. This also has the added bonus of preserving chapter info and concatenating BD titles that are spread over many m2ts files.

I'm glad to hear RipBot264 is working for you, it is also an excellent tool.
 
+1 for Ripbot with MKVs from MakeMKV. It has always worked well for me. I usually use the highest CRF setting for quality (~16 if I remember right), and while it still produces fairly large files (10-15GB depending on the movie), they are indistinguishable from the original source even on a ~92" screen.
 
Time for a thread hijack. Anybody have a recommendation for tools to rip DVD audio tracks into MP3's?
 
eac3to can't encode MP3s, but it can decode AC3 and supports stdout, so if you have an encoder (LAME perhaps?) that supports stdin, piece of cake.
 
myrison said:
+1 for Ripbot with MKVs from MakeMKV. It has always worked well for me. I usually use the highest CRF setting for quality (~16 if I remember right), and while it still produces fairly large files (10-15GB depending on the movie), they are indistinguishable from the original source even on a ~92" screen.
Click to expand...

Why re-encode at all then?

OP: What are your goals? portability? size? quality? compatability?

I choose to rip directly to MKV with direct video copy (no re-encode) and reencode the TrueHD or DTS-HD / DTS-HD MA tracks to AAC (Nero 1.5.1)

This gives the best balance of size, speed of rip (e.g., extremely fast - mabye 10 minutes?) and quality (100% of original video - audio is indistinguishable from the lossless track) all IMO of course.

Average size is mabye 18 gb but can vary widely; examples:
Billy Madison - 13.3 GB
StarTrek - 29.1 GB
The Hulk - 14.9 GB
District 9 - 15.8 GB
Pam's Labrynth - 13.6 GB
Inglorious Basterds - 27.6 GB
SHOOT 'EM UP - 15.5 GB
Akira - 17.7 GB
--Akira's original Japanese lossless (DTS - MA) track is 15 (!!!) GB alone at 192 Khz 24 bit 5.1 That one I resampled to 96 Khz 24 bit and the 900 mb AAC sounds every bit as good; including comparing to bitstreaming the DTS-MA track straight to my Onkyo 606
 
okashira said:
Why re-encode at all then?

OP: What are your goals? portability? size? quality? compatability?

I choose to rip directly to MKV with direct video copy (no re-encode) and reencode the TrueHD or DTS-HD / DTS-HD MA tracks to AAC (Nero 1.5.1)

This gives the best balance of size, speed of rip (e.g., extremely fast - mabye 10 minutes?) and quality (100% of original video - audio is indistinguishable from the lossless track) all IMO of course.

Average size is mabye 18 gb but can vary widely; examples:
Billy Madison - 13.3 GB
StarTrek - 29.1 GB
The Hulk - 14.9 GB
District 9 - 15.8 GB
Pam's Labrynth - 13.6 GB
Inglorious Basterds - 27.6 GB
SHOOT 'EM UP - 15.5 GB
Akira - 17.7 GB
--Akira's original Japanese lossless (DTS - MA) track is 15 (!!!) GB alone at 192 Khz 24 bit 5.1 That one I resampled to 96 Khz 24 bit and the 900 mb AAC sounds every bit as good; including comparing to bitstreaming the DTS-MA track straight to my Onkyo 606
Click to expand...

can you please explaing how do you accomplish this? what software do you use? settings?
 
okashira said:
Why re-encode at all then?

OP: What are your goals? portability? size? quality? compatability?

I choose to rip directly to MKV with direct video copy (no re-encode) and reencode the TrueHD or DTS-HD / DTS-HD MA tracks to AAC (Nero 1.5.1)

This gives the best balance of size, speed of rip (e.g., extremely fast - mabye 10 minutes?) and quality (100% of original video - audio is indistinguishable from the lossless track) all IMO of course.

Average size is mabye 18 gb but can vary widely; examples:
Billy Madison - 13.3 GB
StarTrek - 29.1 GB
The Hulk - 14.9 GB
District 9 - 15.8 GB
Pam's Labrynth - 13.6 GB
Inglorious Basterds - 27.6 GB
SHOOT 'EM UP - 15.5 GB
Akira - 17.7 GB
--Akira's original Japanese lossless (DTS - MA) track is 15 (!!!) GB alone at 192 Khz 24 bit 5.1 That one I resampled to 96 Khz 24 bit and the 900 mb AAC sounds every bit as good; including comparing to bitstreaming the DTS-MA track straight to my Onkyo 606
Click to expand...

I'm not aware of getting 100% of the HD audio to AAC. In fact you are the only person to mention it. The entire community that doesn't keep the HD audio as is will re-encode to lossless FLAC. In fact there is only one decoder that can give you 100% of DTS-MA for all 7.1 channels and that's arcsoft's decoder. So if you aren't using that you aren't getting all of the audio.

Info here on decoders to use for various audio formats:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Eac3to/How_to_Use#Audio_Decoders

You can also re-encode and end up with a movie that in most cases is indistinguishable from the original. The obvious advantage is saving space. But there are two other reasons to do it. One is that windows 7 doesn't handle VC-1 well. And there are ways around that. One is re-encoding to AVC.
The other reason to re-encode is if your movie has forced subs. Any movie with subs requires you to use vsfilter to see them. In all but MPC-HC and media portal this will break hardware acceleration. If you re-encode you can build those forced subs directly into the image itself. You then don't need to use vsfilter and you will still get hardware acceleration.

Forced subs, for those that don't know, are the english speaking parts of a movie when people are talking in another language. Such as the beginning of Angels and Demons. Or the aliens in District 9. Forced subs are something you have to have.
 
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Yes, forced subs. I remember the last DVD I tried to do with forced subs, Star Wars, EP1. What a PITA but you've got to have them.

Okashira: My goal, for the time being, is to rip my TV shows that I have in BD. So, I'm looking for less of hit on in the storage department. Being that they're TV shows the lossless codecs are a non-issue. Using RipBot264 I can take the file size down to half and I can't tell the difference between the original and my rips. For now, RipBot264 fits my needs. I might consider ripping my movies when we have better options for storage. 2TB per drive just isn't enough for me to consider it yet.

However, I'll look into what you posted, I'm really intrigued. I might now be ripping movies yet, but I'm going to give this a try now, see how it pans out. Thanks for the suggestion.
 
Archer75 said:
I'm not aware of getting 100% of the HD audio to AAC. In fact you are the only person to mention it. The entire community that doesn't keep the HD audio as is will re-encode to lossless FLAC. In fact there is only one decoder that can give you 100% of DTS-MA for all 7.1 channels and that's arcsoft's decoder. So if you aren't using that you aren't getting all of the audio.
Click to expand...

The first to mention it on this forum you mean? Eac3to-->Arcsoft DTS Decoder --> Nero 1.5.1 AAC Encoder

Same method as those who encode to FLAC except replace FLAC with AAC. using AAC over FLAC offers the advantage of using 10% of the space yet it will be completely indistinguishable from the original HD track (or FLAC) 99% of hte time.

Archer75 said:
Info here on decoders to use for various audio formats:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Eac3to/How_to_Use#Audio_Decoders

You can also re-encode and end up with a movie that in most cases is indistinguishable from the original. The obvious advantage is saving space. But there are two other reasons to do it. One is that windows 7 doesn't handle VC-1 well. And there are ways around that. One is re-encoding to AVC.
The other reason to re-encode is if your movie has forced subs. Any movie with subs requires you to use vsfilter to see them. In all but MPC-HC and media portal this will break hardware acceleration. If you re-encode you can build those forced subs directly into the image itself. You then don't need to use vsfilter and you will still get hardware acceleration.

Forced subs, for those that don't know, are the english speaking parts of a movie when people are talking in another language. Such as the beginning of Angels and Demons. Or the aliens in District 9. Forced subs are something you have to have.
Click to expand...

On the other hand, in my experience at least, transcoding video always results in somthing which is noticibly lower quality then the original (even when going to a higher bitrate) Now, this usually comes from comparing the two side by side, and the quality of the re-encode of blu rays is most certaintly acceptable, I just choose not to do it...

On forced subs... this a problem i'm dealing with atm myself :(
 
perrosky said:
can you please explaing how do you accomplish this? what software do you use? settings?
Click to expand...

The programs I use are

Another EAC3to GUI
HdBrStreamExtractor
MakeMKV
MVKMerge GUI
yr_eac3to_more_gui

Support tools:
AnyDVDHD
Nero 1.5.1 Encoder
Arcsoft DTS Decoder
Eac3to


I also use Shark007's codecs for W7 and everything plays - including VC-1 based MKV's...

Another EAC3to GUI and eac3to & more GUI both offer a one-step process of making blu-ray ---> MKV EXCEPT you must use FLAC! I am trying to convince both authors to add an opton in their GUI for AAC (it will require minimal effort on their part - just have to feed Eac3to XXX.m4a instead of XXX.FLAC)

I typically use Another EAC3o GUI and use custom command line options to choose my audio and sub tracks, and change FLAC to AAC (by changing XXXXXX.FLAC to XXXXXX.M4A in the command line)

Then I load MKVMerge GUI to make the MKV.

The slowest part of the process is encoding HD audio to AAC, which is done in parallel with demuxing everything else. MKV merge is then limited by your disk speed.
 
okashira said:
The first to mention it on this forum you mean? Eac3to-->Arcsoft DTS Decoder --> Nero 1.5.1 AAC Encoder

Same method as those who encode to FLAC except replace FLAC with AAC. using AAC over FLAC offers the advantage of using 10% of the space yet it will be completely indistinguishable from the original HD track (or FLAC) 99% of hte time.
Click to expand...

No, the first to mention it anywhere. I've never heard that before. Going to AAC instead of FLAC. I was surprised to hear that. I wonder why it's not discussed more...
With FLAC you can get 24bit audio but you have to use the madflac decoder. Can you get 24bit audio from AAC and if so which decoder is used? AAC can support 7.1 audio?


FLAC is already pretty small. 10% of the size would yield an audio file under 400mb?


okashira said:
On the other hand, in my experience at least, transcoding video always results in somthing which is noticibly lower quality then the original (even when going to a higher bitrate) Now, this usually comes from comparing the two side by side, and the quality of the re-encode of blu rays is most certaintly acceptable, I just choose not to do it...

On forced subs... this a problem i'm dealing with atm myself :(
Click to expand...

I compare side by side, frame by frame, when I say with most movies there is no noticable difference. I use CQ=18 in both handbrake and ripbot with a 4.1 profile and auto crop. Most movies, not all.
 
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Archer75 said:
With FLAC you can get 24bit audio but you have to use the madflac decoder. Can you get 24bit audio from AAC and if so which decoder is used?
Click to expand...

Though lossy audio doesn't have bit-depths, it's decoded to PCM in the end anyway, and when that happens, it's most likely 16-bit PCM, though you can go as high as 32-bit PCM.

Archer75 said:
I compare side by side, frame by frame, when I say with most movies there is no noticable difference. I use CQ=18 in both handbrake and ripbot with a 4.1 profile and auto crop. Most movies, not all.
Click to expand...

I hope you don't just choose settings that 'seem' good if you don't know what you're doing. You should never use CQ over CRF unless you have a valid reason to.
 
Snowknight26 said:
Though lossy audio doesn't have bit-depths, it's decoded to PCM in the end anyway, and when that happens, it's most likely 16-bit PCM, though you can go as high as 32-bit PCM.
Click to expand...

The source is lossless audio. The decoded audio sometimes has 8 "fake" bits and eac3to will dump those and encode as 16bit. Some really is 24bit audio and the eac3to logs indicate it's being re-encoded as 24bit. Madflac is a 24bit decoder.


Snowknight26 said:
I hope you don't just choose settings that 'seem' good if you don't know what you're doing. You should never use CQ over CRF unless you have a valid reason to.
Click to expand...

The author of ripbot said that CQ-18 will give you the best quality. Since he wrote the program that was good enough for me.

Of course I also ran my own tests.
 
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Archer75 said:
The source is lossless audio. The decoded audio sometimes has 8 "fake" bits and eac3to will dump those and encode as 16bit. Some really is 24bit audio and the eac3to logs indicate it's being re-encoded as 24bit.
Click to expand...
You aren't making an sense so I'm just going to disregard most of that. eac3to uses the maximum bit-depth possible (64-bit floating point, though if you're encoding lossy audio with NeroAacEnc, then only 32-bit) when decoding lossy audio. Plus, I was quoting you talking about AAC which is lossy. What the AAC is made from is irrelevant.

Archer75 said:
The author of ripbot said that CQ-18 will give you the best quality. Since her wrote the program that was good enough for me.

Of course I also ran my own tests.
Click to expand...
..and the people who wrote x264 say that CRF is best, and it's true. So much for those tests you ran.
 
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Snowknight26 said:
You aren't making an sense so I'm just going to disregard most of that. eac3to uses the maximum bit-depth possible (64-bit floating point, though if you're encoding lossy audio with NeroAacEnc, then only 32-bit) when decoding lossy audio. Plus, I was quoting you talking about AAC which is lossy. What the AAC is made from is irrelevant.
Click to expand...

Lossless audio from DTS-MA/TrueHD. There is lossless AAC and lossless FLAC. eac3to reports the audio on the BD is either 16bit or 24bit audio. Alot of bluray audio is 24bit. The 24bit audio is being decoded and re-encoded to 24bit lossless FLAC. Madflac is a 24bit decoder and the preferred choice. I don't know how that doesn't make any sense. It's all discussed in the guide I linked to on the first page. I'm currently using FLAC, not AAC.

Snowknight26 said:
..and the people who wrote x264 say that CRF is best, and it's true, because QC mode turns off AQ. So much for those tests you ran.
Click to expand...

I can't tell the difference when comparing frame by frame. And that's all that matters.
 
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Archer75 said:
I don't know how that doesn't make any sense. It's all discussed in the guide I linked to on the first page.
Click to expand...
What doesn't make any sense is how none of what you've said so far has pertaind to my reply when I first quoted you. Oh, and the part about lossless AAC.. no such thing.



Archer75 said:
I can't tell the difference when comparing frame by frame. And that's all that matters.
Click to expand...

Except you implied you could when you said you said you did your own tests after the author of so-and-so claimed it was better, hence sticking with QP?
 
Snowknight26 said:
What doesn't make any sense is how none of what you've said so far has pertaind to my reply when I first quoted you.
Click to expand...

What you first quoted was me talking about FLAC AND AAC. Thus the confusion. I assumed because you quoted me talking about both that you were possibly referring to both. No big deal.


Snowknight26 said:
Except you implied you could when you said you said you did your own tests after the author of so-and-so claimed it was better, hence sticking with QP?
Click to expand...

It was not my intent to imply anything. Let me rephrase: He(the author) said CQ=18 was the best you could get with ripbot. I tested that and found it to be true. For the majority of my re-encodes that setting yields video that is indistinguishable from the original, for most movies. Others in the thread I posted on the first page did their own tests with ripbot and agree.

I then did tests with handbrake and find that CQ also works best for me with that app.
 
Like I said, there's no reason to use CQ over CRF. Switch to CRF and you'll get the same quality at a smaller file size.
 
Snowknight26 said:
Like I said, there's no reason to use CQ over CRF. Switch to CRF and you'll get the same quality at a smaller file size.
Click to expand...

Oh I did try that.

My goal was to get the smallest size I could get but with the re-encoded video indistinguishable from the original. I found that CQ gave me the results I was after(most of the time) whereas I couldn't achieve the same with CRF. I wish I could. I used settings discussed on the ripbot/doom9 and handbrake forums.
If you can recommend different settings to use for handbrake i'd be happy to give it another try.
 
If you can't achieve the same quality with CQ vs CRF mode, you're (or Handbrake or whatever you're using) are doing something terribly wrong. You could always try lowering the CRF, but...

Archer75 said:
I used settings discussed on the ripbot/doom9 and handbrake forums.
Click to expand...

They would have told you to ditch the GUI and/or use a custom command line, not one of the presets that comes with each program. Something as simple as x264 --crf 18 --preset slow --output file.ext input.ext should be enough.
 
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