Are my htpc's specs sufficient to rip/compress blurays?

I have a core 2 quad and I have no problem re encoding blu ray's. It takes about 6-7 hours to do a 2 pass high quality re encode on bd rebuilder. That is taking a 35+ gb movie only blu ray down to ~23gb. It takes less or more time depending on the sizeof the file or the setting (2 pass vs 1 makes a big difference, as well as high vs good quality etc.) My cpu is the rather pedestrain q8200 at 2.33 ghz so I imagine you could do the same with your setup, though I imagine it would take a while longer than mine. If not, I have seen core 2 quads like mine on the used market for around $50, so you could always throw that in your lga775 setup. You would be in about $100 with the bd drive and cpu if you got good deals on both. I have found the core 2 quad in my setup to be great. I have a bunch of drives, so I can rip to one hard drive, re encode from one drive to another and watch a blu ray from another drive on power dvd 9(which came with my ~$60 bd burner) all at the same time with no hiccups. Sometimes i am even browsing the web on my other screen while the movie plays. I have found no reason to upgrade from this setup. You likely won't be able to multi task like that, but you should be good.
Edited by chadsdsmith - 6/27/12 at 12:26pm

What is your goal? To fit them on a SL dvd? Just to save some space? How much space do you want to save on each rip? How "good" do they need to be?
Compressing a 1 hr TV show, which is about 42 min of actual show, once the commercials are removed, down to 2G or so, from 8G start, and trying to preserve quality to a fairly high level would take my q6600 between 4 and 6 hrs, overclocked to 3.0G Without OC, about twice as fast as yours.

OTOH if I had cared less about the quality, I could have compressed those in an hour. They would still have been watchable for many, but not me. If I'm going to go to the trouble of compressing them, I'd like to be able to enjoy them as much as possible.

With hdd storage the way it is now, storing uncompressed is going to cost you $1-$2 per movie to keep them online.

i am running a C2D overclocked at 2.59ghz and It takes upwards of 24 hours to do a single movie. i havent done one in a very long time.

Yes, it's powerful enough.

The bottleneck in ripping discs is the drive's speed. CPU virtually never
matters.

The bottleneck in transcoding video is the CPU's "speed." A faster CPU
will transcode more quickly, sometimes by several orders of magnitude.
It's not required.

It definitely can. I think that's all it can do.


I've only ripped about 6. They range from ~21GB to ~35GB for the movie, one or
sometimes two audio tracks, and subtitles.

Yes, and usually less than 30GB. Most are 20-24.

Save your CPU pointless cycles and just keep lossless. Google "Staples 30 off 150 coupons" and get one of the Seagate GoFlex Desk 3TB USB 3.0 drives for 149.99 when they're back in stock. http://www.staples.com/Seagate-GoFlex-Desk-3TB-External-Hard-Drive-USB-30/product_365895?externalize=certona

Pop it out of it's case and you'll have a ST3000DM001 for $20 cheaper than the bare drive, and you can re-use the enclosure if you have another sata drive

Most people re-encode for some odd desire to view there movies on their shiny new tablet. Here's my list of reasons for not doing this

1. I don't have a shiny new tablet
2. If I did, I'd rarely ever prefer to watch movies on it versus my two HDTVs
3. I don't enjoy a movie on a 11" or smaller screen
4. If I did want to do these things, I would wait for a tablet that supports 1920x1080

How many blurays are you planning on ripping? 3 terabyte will get you about 100 movies, if you're planning on doing more than that you'll have to resize them using BD Rebuilder. That CPU would take a while on the highest quality settings, it would be something you'd let run overnight.

I've never used makemkv. I've used mkvmerge, but it won't read m2ts files. I generally use tsmuxer, since it can read the playlist and select the correct m2ts files and remux. It will not create an mkv container, just m2ts or ts. I usually stick with m2ts even though they waste a bit of space because I can use the subtitles directly, if there are forced subs in the move. I'd say 25G-30G is about average once you remove the extra languages and junk.