Home Cinema...ripping blu rays to HDD...best way??

GinG

GinG

GinG

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Now my tv & surround sound setup is sorted, I am now wanting to start planning a HTPC/Streaming setup to compliment it.

I think I will more than likely go down the route of PC (used to rip blurays, dvd's etc) > Central Storage (Music, films, tv series etc) > Streamer > TV.

I would like to think I could rip the blurays from the pc to the storage without any considerable loss in quality, what is the best way to do this?

Interested to find out how have you guys done it?

Cheers

Graham
 
MakeMKV to copy the film (strips all extras/menu/other language audio files, etc).

Then Handbrake to encode to a smaller, but virtually no loss in IQ, .h264 stream mkv file.

I prefer keeping the full audio file, so use MKVcleaver to rip the audio/any needed subtitles.

If there are subtitles, I use BDsuptosub to convert them to .sub files because within a mkv container the .sup files can't stream for some reason.

Then I use MKVmerge to merge the encoded .h264 stream, audio file and subtitles (if any).
 
Thanks for the above...roughly how long does it take to do all that? And I assume each software walks you through the processes?
 
MakeMKV, MKVcleaver and BDsuptosub are all very straight forward. Takes a few minutes to understand what you need to do, then it's all go from there.

MakeMKV usually about 30-40 minutes.
MKVcleaver about 10 minutes.
BDsuptosub a few seconds.

Handbrake is the one which I had to experiment with a bit to see what I IQ I liked, and the settings etc.
I usually encode with a constant quality of 18 (65%), or 20 (60%) for a series/TV show, and unless I'm actually comparing frame to frame with the original, I can't tell a difference.
This takes me about 6 hours to encode, with the 'Advanced' settings at default, with the exception of 'Adaptive B Frames' which I have on Optimal.
It's CPU dependent though so that's what it takes me on my i5 760 @ 3.36GHz.
And the output is about half the size or less of the original (varies from film to film).
 
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well with the price of hardrives these days why not just rip the main movie out and dont compress it as thats why you get blu-rays for the picture quality isnt it,yes i no you dont loss a lot of quality when you do compress but just a chew on doing it,bang a few 2tb drives in there and sorted
 
sunderland said:
well with the price of hardrives these days why not just rip the main movie out and dont compress it as thats why you get blu-rays for the picture quality isnt it,yes i no you dont loss a lot of quality when you do compress but just a chew on doing it,bang a few 2tb drives in there and sorted
Click to expand...

's what I do. MakeMKV is only as slow as your optical drive and space hdd space is cheap these days - i just leave out the extras (unless i want them...not often though) and remove the audio tracks I dont want. Simple.
 
For me, I would do that if I had space for harddrives but with the SG03 case I can only fit 2 drives so lacking space.
I have a duo dock with space for 2 HDDs which I'm using but with full size blurays it's still not going to be enough room.
 
Razor-BladE said:
As much as I'd love to drop £300 on storage, I don't quite have funds. And 3TB HDDs are so expensive! Can get 2x2TB for less than a 3TB.
Click to expand...

You've got two choices. compress them and lose storage or buy more storage. Drives are cheap and you dont need to buy more than one at a time, right? 2tb = at least 40 blurays, probably closer to 50-55. one drive will keep you going for quite a while without having to re-encode anything at all. is that still too expensive?
 
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2TB drives are what I'm using. I was comparing the price of 2TB to 3TB.
And I makes backups of the files so where I use 2TB, I have to buy 4TB.
And for no perceivable loss in quality, I don't mind having to spend the time encoding if it means I can fit more than double the films in a 2TB drive.

For example, I have just under 30 films ripped, and it's taking just 400GB.
 
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Question then....

If I want to store the Blue Ray film as a Blue Ray film but on a NAS can I do this? I used to rip my DVD's to hard drives, stripping the extras but using a Windows Media Centre PC I could simply point it to the hard disk drive where the files were located and even though they were ripped to a hard disk they would loose zero quality and act like a DVD with all the menus etc.

Can one do the same with Blue Rays assuming storage is not an issue. In simply terms I want to maintain the original encoding to I am not losing quality and ideal have a front end menu system (suggestions on what please) if possible?
 
Yes, you can make a 1:1 bit copy of the disc, but not with Handbrake.

I've used DVDFab and it does the job fine, but makes it an iso file. I'm not sure what other containers support it.
 
i use dvdfab to rip my movies(95% blu ray), and it converts to MKV, ISO, or folder structure which i use, currently sitting at 9TB of movies around 40 mins per movie to rip
 
I currently do this and use the following,

MakeMKV to rip. I remove all the extras and just keep the film. I don't compress at all as I want maximum quality (I want my HTPC to be as good as a dedicated BluRay player). This takes maybe half an hour.

External USB drive for storage. This will soon me changed to a 4 bay NAS.

Accer Revo 3700 running Linux and XBMC. This is the star of the show! I picked it up for £180, followed the online guide and I now have a box that looks amazing (XBMC is very skinable) and plays everything with no hassle whatsoever.

It's really worth doing as a project. I have way to many DVD's/Blurays for my small flat so I've ripped them all and everything is so much easier now!
 
Another vote for dvdfab, I rip a couple of discs to the computer first, then cue them up overnight to encode, settings I use vary depending on film, i always use audio passthru but I don't mind using 720 for chick flicks for the mrs, but if it's an action film it's always 1080 and a bitrate of 10000kbps, usually end up with around a 10-15 gb file for my movies and 3-6 for hers.

Also dvdfab is so easy to use it is unbelievable and is constantly updated with the latest workarounds.

Glad I got the i7 though as it eats them for breakfast, I can get a 1 pass encode done in about 2.5 hours at the settings stated
 
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