So I've been ripping my DVDs and I'm about ready to move onto my blu-rays. What I would like to know is what is a good ripper that will give me a file with video and audio quality equal to what's on the disc? I've tried a certain site to get movies but they only advertise 720p. Somebody said they have 1080p but I have yet to find one. So what is the best/ easiest to use for blu-rays be it payed or free.
MakeMKV
Free software. Will rip the BD's into an mkv container and allow you to pick which audio and sub tracks you want to include.
DVDFab
More options for file types including 3D. Rather expensive.
Oh cool I didn't know makemkv worked for bluray too. If I were to use handbrake on the file would it reduce the visual quality of the movie?
Thanks for the quick response.
I think handbrake is great for reducing file size and preserving quality.
Any transcoding to make the file smaller WILL affect quality BUT what the eye cannot see the heart won't grieve over.
Video is VERY subjective. Try handbrake with various CRF levels. Most people think x264 with CRF=18 is pretty good :-)
Make sure to use standard profiles only, e.g. level 4.1@
high and dont use variable framerate. That way every HW player will play them. It is also good practice to include a fallback audio track without patented codec. AC3 is played by most standalone players, though.
If widesapread playback compatibility is an issue then you should use <Main>, not <High> for your profile.
RF18
Film
Main
L4.1
Speed will depend on your CPU and how big you want the file to be (I use Fast or Medium) but high action movies with grain tend to hover near 20GB even after encoding with these settings.
Make sure that the first audio track is a 2-channel .aac stream
The 2nd can pretty much be anything, I usually just pass thru the AC3 or DTS track
.mp4 will usually give better compatibility across devices than .mkv, but if the file is bigger than 4GB then <Large File Size> must be selected or you'll get something that is completely unplayable. With RF18, virtually any BR will be much, much larger than this.
You guys talking about handbrake when you talk about profiles right?
Not necessarily. Also x264 commandline Encoder understands those options. Those are standardized profiles within h264.
(2014-09-09, 18:32)Tatts4Life Wrote: [ -> ]You guys talking about handbrake when you talk about profiles right?
Your h264 files have to have a level assigned to them. You just do this through Handbrake on the VIDEO tab. 5.1 has compression advantages but you can run into devices that don't support L5.1.
Basically, the level just indicates maximum levels for things like bitrates, reference frames and some encoding features like CABAC. If you aren't too worried about those things, just stick with 4.1 and don't lose any sleep over the lost 6-8% efficiency.
So how big do bluray files range when ripping just the main movie and nothing else? I would like to get an average of all my movies so that I know what size drive to buy to start with while I save up to build a larger storage system.
Feature-length movies without compression, they run around 30Gb. Compressed, it varies (of course), but depending on your compression settings, you can knock that down to about 6-8Gb.
On my systems, with the same compression settings, "Captain America" comes in at 5Gb, while "The Avengers" is 6.3Gb
Thanks that helps. I'll have to mess around when I get my bluray drive and see if I notice a difference between compressed or not. There's a very good chance I'll have to get either another big hard drive or say screw it and work on a large storage system before I burn my blurays.