Slimming down Blu-ray rips

S

SocceRich20

2[H]4U
Joined
Aug 4, 2003
Messages
2,512
When I started ripping my Blu-ray collection, I had 4x 1.5 TB drives to store it all on, and figured I would be fine ripping them as images with AnyDVD HD. About a year later, I've realized that this was an unrealistic plan, as most of my drives are just about full. I also find it pretty annoying to have to go through the menus, watch preview ads, and all that nonsense. I just want the main movie.

What I am asking is, what is the best way to go about trimming down my Blu-ray images so that I'm left with a simple mkv or equivalent? The only criteria I have is that I want to maintain 100% original image quality. I love that crystal clear image, and don't want to compromise quality.
 
Video compression is going to have loss otherwise you will have very low compression rates. If you do not believe that try 7zipping video. If you want much smaller files you need to balance the loss to a level that produces acceptable video.
 
MakeMKV will rip your movies down to a 100% mkv file. Doesn't shrink your size too much though. Probably only lose 5gb or so per movie depending on content. Inception (most recent that I can remember) went from ~40GB to ~30GB. I would suggest compression though, as you can go to less than 50% size without a significant reduction in quality. I use Handbrake to compress the mkv files.
 
valve1138 said:
Run them through Handbrake
Click to expand...

+1
The new 0.95 build handles blue rays ok.
Use the high profile preset with a constant quality RF value of 18.5 (or smaller). It won't be as good as the original if you go pixel peeping but it looks really nice. A 43 gig 3hr movie crunched down to ~14 gig. It will take a while. With an i7 930 @ 3.85 Ghz it will take over 4.5 hours. Using the normal preset will go about 3x faster but the IQ may be lower and the file size larger. Give it a test drive and let us know what you think.
 
SocceRich20 said:
When I started ripping my Blu-ray collection, I had 4x 1.5 TB drives to store it all on, and figured I would be fine ripping them as images with AnyDVD HD. About a year later, I've realized that this was an unrealistic plan, as most of my drives are just about full. I also find it pretty annoying to have to go through the menus, watch preview ads, and all that nonsense. I just want the main movie.

What I am asking is, what is the best way to go about trimming down my Blu-ray images so that I'm left with a simple mkv or equivalent? The only criteria I have is that I want to maintain 100% original image quality. I love that crystal clear image, and don't want to compromise quality.
Click to expand...

DEMUX video source with TxMuxer or eac3to+ClownBD gui.
Can find the source playlist with BDInfo.
Remux back with MKVMerge..
 
Heres a guide a friend of mine wrote a while back. Its a little old, but still relevant
http://sites.google.com/site/xorphdstuff/remuxing

basically just use eac3to to remove all the extras and get an MKV with the original video and HD audio track, and remove all the fluff like extra audio in other languages etc. You get a mkv video file and an audio file and then mux with MKVmerge into a single MKV with all the good stuff untouched. I generally get files in the 20GB range, which is a huge savings vs a full rip (40+ GB)

There are GUIs to use with eac3to, but I just use the command line since it seems more flexible and isn't actually all that hard. The only wrinkle is when movies are stored in multiple m2ts files instead of one big one, then you have use the playlist folders. 90% of the time its a single big file in the stream folder, which you can just drag and drop into the command prompt to fill in the path automatically
 
a good compressed movie around 10-15G in size, i would be willing to bet you would not see the difference between it and your retail disks interms of visual quality.
 
Not if the movie is 4 hours long and very grainy. You can't give ranges like that because of a wide range of variables that's different for each film. Heck, you could double the size of the source and it could still look horrible.
 
go to the movie.
find the largest .m2ts file (assume this is the movie file)
demux with tsmuxer
remux with mkvmerge, taking only the main video, audio, and subtitles if necessary.


You will save a few gigs simply by using the mkv container instead of m2ts. You will save some more gigs by ditching all the extras, extra audio tracks, and unnecessary subs.

This is how I backup my movies. Although, sometimes it doesn't work, on Inception for example, the largest .m2ts wasn't the movie file.
 
Snowknight26 said:
Not if the movie is 4 hours long and very grainy. You can't give ranges like that because of a wide range of variables that's different for each film. Heck, you could double the size of the source and it could still look horrible.
Click to expand...

a bad source is a bad source, nothing can really fix it too much, sure you can use some filters, but you cant magically turn a crappy source into a great encode.

i hate that so many movies released as BR are just crap, no excuse for it.
 
I meant that you could double the size of a source and it could look worse than one that's half the size of the source. The generalization that any encode 10-15GB in size should look pristine doesn't hold any truth except in a best-case scenario.
 
grimreeferx09 said:
go to the movie.
find the largest .m2ts file (assume this is the movie file)
demux with tsmuxer
remux with mkvmerge, taking only the main video, audio, and subtitles if necessary.


You will save a few gigs simply by using the mkv container instead of m2ts. You will save some more gigs by ditching all the extras, extra audio tracks, and unnecessary subs.

This is how I backup my movies. Although, sometimes it doesn't work, on Inception for example, the largest .m2ts wasn't the movie file.
Click to expand...

Use BDInfo.. Don't just pull the largest m2ts.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top