Why didn't anyone tell me it was this easy?

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munkle

[H]F Junkie
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So I never really got into ripping my blu-rays because I always seemed to have some kind of codec, audio, or player issue. I was recently reading about plex and I thought I would give it a try. I downloaded makemkv. Ripped a blu-ray, put it in my testmovie library. Showed up on in the plex media center app. Clicked on the movie and it played just fine. Easiest thing ever. Didn't have to worry about codecs, using handbrake or anything.

I wish someone would have shown me this earlier. I would have ripped all my blurays long ago.

Also just to make sure, when I rip a bluray with makemkv it doesn't do anything to degrade the quality does it? To my understanding it just puts the movie as is into a container.
 
jkjambo said:
Have you ever asked about it?
Click to expand...

Yes and it always turned out to be a mess. For an example last time I tried I used makemkv to rip my blurays. I asked what I needed to play the mkvs. I forgot what I installed but it jacked up windows media center so that live tv did not have audio. Basically it was either live tv or mkvs. I went with live tv because inserting my discs wasn't too hard. But now that I have found this, it makes it brain dead simple.

EDIT: omg i'm in nerd heaven, I forgot I installed plex on my roku and so I have the grandfathered free version. Just tried it out and its legit! Seriously going to rip all my blu-rays now.
 
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We tried to keep it secret from you so we could have the uncompressed goodness all to ourselves.
 
munkle said:
Yes and it always turned out to be a mess. For an example last time I tried I used makemkv to rip my blurays. I asked what I needed to play the mkvs. I forgot what I installed but it jacked up windows media center so that live tv did not have audio. Basically it was either live tv or mkvs. I went with live tv because inserting my discs wasn't too hard. But now that I have found this, it makes it brain dead simple.

EDIT: omg i'm in nerd heaven, I forgot I installed plex on my roku and so I have the grandfathered free version. Just tried it out and its legit! Seriously going to rip all my blu-rays now.
Click to expand...

It's the ZOMG YOU NEED CAT !7F NETWORK CABLE affect.

Too many people around here make shit too complicated.
 
munkle said:
So I never really got into ripping my blu-rays because I always seemed to have some kind of codec, audio, or player issue. I was recently reading about plex and I thought I would give it a try. I downloaded makemkv. Ripped a blu-ray, put it in my testmovie library. Showed up on in the plex media center app. Clicked on the movie and it played just fine. Easiest thing ever. Didn't have to worry about codecs, using handbrake or anything.

I wish someone would have shown me this earlier. I would have ripped all my blurays long ago.

Also just to make sure, when I rip a bluray with makemkv it doesn't do anything to degrade the quality does it? To my understanding it just puts the movie as is into a container.
Click to expand...

Nice to know. I haven't gotten around to ripping my blurays yet.

I do have a server at home for file serving, and was looking for the backend to put on that. I've heard a lot of good things about Plex, so I will definitely give it a look. It seems to work with almost anything...WMC, XBMC, Plex Client, etc. I'll have to spin up a VM and give it a whirl.
 
munkle said:
Also just to make sure, when I rip a bluray with makemkv it doesn't do anything to degrade the quality does it? To my understanding it just puts the movie as is into a container.
Click to expand...

Correct. It only transmuxes the video, meaning the audio/video codecs are still intact, and it spits them out into an .mkv container. Using a transcoder like Handbrake will re-encode the audio/video and create a lossy output.

It really is a great process. I previously used AnyDVD + Arcsoft to playback BD rips, and it was much more of a pain in the ass. MakeMkv really is an awesome program - if it ever gets out of beta, I will buy a license.

My parents have even started using MakeMkv + Plex and caught onto it without a hitch!
 
I am surprised so many rip blurays without any sort of compression. I run everything I have through handbrake and a 1080p thats 10 - 12 gigs cranks out indistinguishable(to me) from the original.
 
The Lurker said:
I am surprised so many rip blurays without any sort of compression. I run everything I have through handbrake and a 1080p thats 10 - 12 gigs cranks out indistinguishable(to me) from the original.
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1. Storage is cheap.
2. What you can't see, others CAN see.... just because you can't tell the difference doesn't mean lots of other people can't.
3. I'd rather not tie up processing power having Handbrake chewing on a BD rip just to save a gig or two... goes right back to #1.
 
I'm about to embark on 1:1 ripping of my BDs to a server.
I had intended to rip into ISO's with AnyDVDHD... but now am considering using MakeMKV instead.

Can anybody comment on either approach?
 
I just rip them whole. No isos. There's no point. I like all the menus and extra features to remain intact.
 
valve1138 said:
I just rip them whole. No isos. There's no point. I like all the menus and extra features to remain intact.
Click to expand...

An iso keeps the menu... it's just a 1:1 mountable disc.

You rip them into the folder structure?
 
@OP

Welcome to the prestigious club. You need to pay your dues. Otherwise, we'll boot kick you out. Dues can be money transferred to me. :)
 
Zangmonkey said:
I'm about to embark on 1:1 ripping of my BDs to a server.
I had intended to rip into ISO's with AnyDVDHD... but now am considering using MakeMKV instead.

Can anybody comment on either approach?
Click to expand...

How do you intend to playback the media? IE: what GUI or software solution?

From my experience, if you rip into ISO's or BDMV folders, you need a 3rd party application to play them back like TotalMediaTheater or PowerDVD. This is beneficial because it allows you to keep the menus and special features if you're into that, and allows 3D movie playback. I've always used WMC with my 1:1 rips, so for XBMC, I'm not sure what your options are.

However if you use TotalMedia Theater or PowerDVD (in recent versions), you're also faced with the horrible DRM called Cinavia depending if the blu ray rip has that DRM protection. There are workarounds for Cinavia, but it is a pain in the ass.

Late last year I switched from full BDMV rips to mkv's and I haven't looked back. I've always been about stripping out the menus and all of the extra crap because I don't care for it. And I can care less about 3D playback - I generally believe 3D is a gimmick, and I can always pop the disk in if I want it.
 
sKiDmArK said:
How do you intend to playback the media? IE: what GUI or software solution?

From my experience, if you rip into ISO's or BDMV folders, you need a 3rd party application to play them back like TotalMediaTheater or PowerDVD. This is beneficial because it allows you to keep the menus and special features if you're into that, and allows 3D movie playback. I've always used WMC with my 1:1 rips, so for XBMC, I'm not sure what your options are.

However if you use TotalMedia Theater or PowerDVD (in recent versions), you're also faced with the horrible DRM called Cinavia depending if the blu ray rip has that DRM protection. There are workarounds for Cinavia, but it is a pain in the ass.

Late last year I switched from full BDMV rips to mkv's and I haven't looked back. I've always been about stripping out the menus and all of the extra crap because I don't care for it. And I can care less about 3D playback - I generally believe 3D is a gimmick, and I can always pop the disk in if I want it.
Click to expand...


I am ultimately looking for a "media-browser" experience, and I'm willing to pay for the software.... similar to the XMBC movies GUI.

I own the retail version of TMT, if I need that.

What do you recommend?
 
Zangmonkey said:
I am ultimately looking for a "media-browser" experience, and I'm willing to pay for the software.... similar to the XMBC movies GUI.

I own the retail version of TMT, if I need that.

What do you recommend?
Click to expand...

I'm big on HTPC's because of HD audio passthrough to my receiver.

I'm personally a fan of Plex, so I'd recommend Plex Home Theater for a good browsing, organization, metadata experience. I hear it's basically a flavor of XBMC, but I can't speak from experience. I use MakeMKV and strip out everything but the main movie, HD & secondary audio streams, and English subtitles, and let Plex server do the rest as far as organization. You wound't need Cyberlink or TMT for this.

However, you can't play back ISO's or 3d movies; so you're limited on that front.

Before Plex, I used MyMovies which integrates into WMC. It's okay, but not as refined as Plex in my opinion - it has the dated WMC feel. However you can launch straight into TMT and play 1:1 rips (whether it is an ISO or BDMV folder) and have full menu + 3D support.

I basically use WMC for live TV + DVR, and Plex Home Theater for all of my local media and rips. So far it's the best compromise of the sides fronts that I've found.
 
Even though makemkv can rip 3D content, there's no easy way to play it back (stereoscopic) and you will need straight backup's with something like TMT to play back.
 
So I just found out plex can read unencrypted media center recordings. That's even better I'm going to add those to my plex library.
 
The Lurker said:
I am surprised so many rip blurays without any sort of compression. I run everything I have through handbrake and a 1080p thats 10 - 12 gigs cranks out indistinguishable(to me) from the original.
Click to expand...

I agree. I finally settled on 14Mbps and "slow" and I can not see any difference on 82" DLP. Any time I think I see an artifact, I go back to the original disc and it is there as well.

Even gets all the grain on night time shots and older movies too.
 
westrock2000 said:
I agree. I finally settled on 14Mbps and "slow" and I can not see any difference on 82" DLP. Any time I think I see an artifact, I go back to the original disc and it is there as well.

Even gets all the grain on night time shots and older movies too.
Click to expand...

Storage is too cheap for me to waste my time using hand brake to encode all my movies. So far I have ripped 93 movies and used roughly 2.5tb of storage, lets just say 3tb. A 3tb drive is $100. Not worth it at all to me to reencode the rips to drop that down to maybe 1-1.5tb.

Also I have seen macroblocking in rips I have tried before in action scenes, I probably could have messed with handbrake to get better image quality, but like I said the space savings isn't worth the time cost to me.
 
just curious, does that work with subtitles or do you need something else to make that work?
 
Mtnduey said:
just curious, does that work with subtitles or do you need something else to make that work?
Click to expand...

It worked with subtitles as far as I have checked, one thing I have heard is that forced subtitles like aliens speaking in a movie and forced subs in english may have an issue, but I haven't tested that out yet.
 
A few examples I was thinking of were things like Anime that is Japanese only but has english subtitles available, then movies like A Good Day to Die Hard has Russian dialog at the beginning and w/o subtitles you miss everything that is said.

Will be interesting to see if anyone using Plex can comment on this. Very curious as this would be a fun solution for my home theater
 
Blue Falcon said:
1. Storage is cheap.
2. What you can't see, others CAN see.... just because you can't tell the difference doesn't mean lots of other people can't.
3. I'd rather not tie up processing power having Handbrake chewing on a BD rip just to save a gig or two... goes right back to #1.
Click to expand...

Exactly what my thoughts were.

Currently have 93 uncompressed Blu-ray rips (mainmovie, subtitles and English audio tracks only; no menus or special features) packaged into ISO files taking up 2.34 TB. Playback is done through XBMC.

Yes, I could possibly encode them and not tell the difference but it would probably take a significant amount of time to encode these, let alone finding the ideal encode settings in the first place. It is not worth it when a 3 TB HDD is so cheap.

93 Blu-rays cost at least £1,000 in the first place and 3 TB HDD is only an extra <£100. Why worry?
 
^^completely agreed. Zero loss in quality over the original BD and no time re-encoding. The convenience alone is worth the cost of the storage.

Everything I have is just mkv's with the movie, subs and lossless audio tracks and they average about 20 gigs each. I play everything back in WMC using Media Browser with MPC-HC set up as an external player
 
westrock2000 said:
I agree. I finally settled on 14Mbps and "slow" and I can not see any difference on 82" DLP. Any time I think I see an artifact, I go back to the original disc and it is there as well.

Even gets all the grain on night time shots and older movies too.
Click to expand...

If you are encoding with handbrake you should be using CRF, not a specific bit-rate. CRF will create a video of constant quality depending on which quality you select. The output size will vary depending on the content of the video and how well it can compress to achieve that constant quality.

Try CRF 18 which should look indistinguishable from the source. The resulting bitrate will be variable which means it can achieve better compression than a constant bitrate.

http://slhck.info/articles/crf
 
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Personally, I hate bluray menus and have no use for 99% of the special features or commentaries or all that crap. If they sold movies without any of that crap and the cost that goes into producing them, for say 20% less, I'd definitely choose that.

And the uncompressed > * crowd will soon learn that compression isn't bad. The music people learnt that and flac is pretty much dead. The same will happen to video as soon has h265 becomes popular in a few years and hw encoding/decoding becomes the norm.

The big reason to just transcode these days is to save on processing time, which should be a non-issue if everyone could just agree on a standard hw implementation instead of Intel quicksync vs CUDA vs AMD etc.
 
Mtnduey said:
A few examples I was thinking of were things like Anime that is Japanese only but has english subtitles available, then movies like A Good Day to Die Hard has Russian dialog at the beginning and w/o subtitles you miss everything that is said.

Will be interesting to see if anyone using Plex can comment on this. Very curious as this would be a fun solution for my home theater
Click to expand...

A good example is Game of Thrones. If you rip the blu rays without PGS subtitles, you will miss the dialogue captions in a lot of the scenes where they speak High Valyrian or Dorthraki. If you rip the blu rays with the PGS subtitles (not forced, just normal) the subtitles will appear in these scenes automatically, and you still have the option to turn them on/off for all dialogue. This works in Plex; of course other media players will vary depending on how subtitles are handled.

Blue Falcon said:
1. Storage is cheap.
2. What you can't see, others CAN see.... just because you can't tell the difference doesn't mean lots of other people can't.
3. I'd rather not tie up processing power having Handbrake chewing on a BD rip just to save a gig or two... goes right back to #1.
Click to expand...

This. I'd probably waste a couple of weeks re-encoding my entire ~10TB library. Unless you're really budgeted for space or expansion, I really don't see a good reason to regularly transcode BD rips.
 
SirMaster said:
If you are encoding with handbrake you should be using CRF, not a specific bit-rate. CRF will create a video of constant quality depending on which quality you select. The output size will vary depending on the content of the video and how well it can compress to achieve that constant quality.

Try CRF 18 which should look indistinguishable from the source. The resulting bitrate will be variable which means it can achieve better compression than a constant bitrate.

http://slhck.info/articles/crf
Click to expand...

I had varying success with Constant Quality. It had problems with Animation in particular, which between me and wife liking Anime and kids watching their stuff we have a couple hundred of them. I found the Average Bit Rate to be good on quality, and I am ok with the predictable file size (LOTR Extended editions come in at around 30GB as well as Gone With The Wind 1080P :( ).
 
munkle said:
Storage is too cheap for me to waste my time using hand brake to encode all my movies. So far I have ripped 93 movies and used roughly 2.5tb of storage, lets just say 3tb. A 3tb drive is $100. Not worth it at all to me to reencode the rips to drop that down to maybe 1-1.5tb.
Click to expand...

Coincidently I have 930 movies in iTunes right now and it comes out to 6.4TB. 3TB may be $100, but I have 5 of them already :(
 
westrock2000 said:
I had varying success with Constant Quality. It had problems with Animation in particular, which between me and wife liking Anime and kids watching their stuff we have a couple hundred of them. I found the Average Bit Rate to be good on quality, and I am ok with the predictable file size (LOTR Extended editions come in at around 30GB as well as Gone With The Wind 1080P :( ).
Click to expand...

Did you choose the tune Animation option? I've been having excellent results with CRF 20 with my animation. 720p episode encodes of stuff like Futurama are ending up at like 150-250MB per episode and look perfect, it's blowing my mind how small they are ending up and how great they look.
 
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I am using a NAS and just checked this morning and I am getting ready to go from 12x2tb to 12x4tb drives. I run Plex off of my NAS and use ZFS with software raid that way if I loose a drive I just need to reinstall a new one.
 
munkle said:
Yes and it always turned out to be a mess. For an example last time I tried I used makemkv to rip my blurays. I asked what I needed to play the mkvs. I forgot what I installed but it jacked up windows media center so that live tv did not have audio. Basically it was either live tv or mkvs. I went with live tv because inserting my discs wasn't too hard. But now that I have found this, it makes it brain dead simple.

EDIT: omg i'm in nerd heaven, I forgot I installed plex on my roku and so I have the grandfathered free version. Just tried it out and its legit! Seriously going to rip all my blu-rays now.
Click to expand...

I might be wrong, but just keep in mind that while MakeMKV is indeed an easy one-step jobber, it doesn't compress. You'd still have that large 20 to 40+ GB MKV file from Blu-ray with just the main movie content (along with audio and subtitles if desired). I think the reason some forums seem a little more complex is because some people want to compress their movies to a reasonable size without sacrificing TOO much quality to achieve the compression.

I use DVDFab to pull the main movie to hard drive, then I use Handbrake because I'm satisfied with it's output with High Profile MKV. It''s also very easy if you do it all the time. I have 670 movies on my 16 TB media server and I'd have long run out of space if I didn't compress them (about 250 of them are Blu-ray).
 
You guys say Plex cannot play back 3d blu ray? I am about to put together an HTPC or NAS solution and was also looking for the best way to playback blu ray rips on my 3d tv. This doesn't require any software, the TV itself accesses my NAS and plays the file in 3D. Problem is the tv accessing my NAS is a very poor interface and with a lot of movies it would be horrible.

I like what you guys are saying about plex and it sounds exactly like what I'm looking for...but I also want to play 3D. Whats the best solution to have everything in one place. I want my library to be like netflix...start it up and have access to everything without needing different programs for 3d and what not.
 
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LenXIII said:
You guys say Plex cannot play back 3d blu ray? I am about to put together an HTPC or NAS solution and was also looking for the best way to playback blu ray rips on my 3d tv. This doesn't require any software, the TV itself accesses my NAS and plays the file in 3D. Problem is the tv accessing my NAS is a very poor interface and with a lot of movies it would be horrible.

I like what you guys are saying about plex and it sounds exactly like what I'm looking for...but I also want to play 3D. Whats the best solution to have everything in one place. I want my library to be like netflix...start it up and have access to everything without needing different programs for 3d and what not.
Click to expand...

3D is a can of worms IMO. If you want to playback framepacked 3D, you need official Blu-ray playback software like Total Media Theater (there's one or two others as well). You can rip the 3D MVC track with tools like MakeMKV, but nothing can play it back that I'm aware of.

You can re-encode your 3D video into SBS or HSBS (full res or half res) where the actual file will play both "eyes" side by side. When you do this, you can turn on the 3D mode on our TV and it will work... but not automatically like a Blu-ray would/does (at the expense of encoding/possible resolution loss); you'll also then have a dedicated 3D and 2D files if you wanted both.
 
LenXIII said:
You guys say Plex cannot play back 3d blu ray? I am about to put together an HTPC or NAS solution and was also looking for the best way to playback blu ray rips on my 3d tv. This doesn't require any software, the TV itself accesses my NAS and plays the file in 3D. Problem is the tv accessing my NAS is a very poor interface and with a lot of movies it would be horrible.

I like what you guys are saying about plex and it sounds exactly like what I'm looking for...but I also want to play 3D. Whats the best solution to have everything in one place. I want my library to be like netflix...start it up and have access to everything without needing different programs for 3d and what not.
Click to expand...

As thegrinch said, you will need a program like TMT to playback 3D rips. I'm no XBMC expert, but I believe you can use the XBMC interface on Windows as the front-end and get TMT to load when playing 3D movies. That method, and using a WMC add-on like MyMovies is the only way I can think of that would get your playback in one interface.

Since you will need TMT or PowerDVD to playback full 3D BD rips, just beware of Cinavia DRM. Archsoft was forced to implement Cinavia support in TMT, so even a 'legitimate' RIP of a BD you own, could run into this bs DRM. AnyDVD has a way around it if you run the application in the background. Older versions of TMT also skip out on Cinavia, but they can be trouble to locate and lack any new features.
 
thegrinch said:
3D is a can of worms IMO. If you want to playback framepacked 3D, you need official Blu-ray playback software like Total Media Theater (there's one or two others as well). You can rip the 3D MVC track with tools like MakeMKV, but nothing can play it back that I'm aware of.

You can re-encode your 3D video into SBS or HSBS (full res or half res) where the actual file will play both "eyes" side by side. When you do this, you can turn on the 3D mode on our TV and it will work... but not automatically like a Blu-ray would/does (at the expense of encoding/possible resolution loss); you'll also then have a dedicated 3D and 2D files if you wanted both.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply grinch. If I was to do a full 3d rip then reencode it in to SBS like you mentioned, then it would play back fine without TMC and such correct? My tv only requires me to press one button on the remote to change it to SBS so it's not much of an issue. But if I encode it to SBS can I assume it will no longer be a proper rip with menus intact? Is there a way to do full menus and features after being reencoded to SBS?

Long story short is my TV is super quick to playback SBS encoded files. So as long as I can encode them decently and play them back with plex or whatever all in one front end I decide to go with then I'm all set. There are only a handful of 3D movies that are any good but my wife still loves the gimick factor. I don't want to have to build my whole setup around half a dozen movies, so if I have to sacrifice a bit on the 3d movies but still have their playback feature I guess I'll be fine.
 
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