Bluray to MKV - Page 3

Originally Posted by agogley 


If a "good compression setting" winds up with pretty much the same size as the original BD file, then the BD file already had pretty good compression. The debate going on here is whether a normal human being can discern that information was lost when compressing a BD to more than half its size. I mean that is a lot of reduction, even if you use a completely different algorithm.

This reminds me of the debates between HDDVD and BD. There were a lot of discussions abou compression at the time because BluRay advertised it supported higher bit rates than BluRay. So HDDVD advocates claimed that HDDVD didn't need higher bit rates because HDDVD supposedly used a better, more efficient compression algorithm.

Originally Posted by fritzi93 

You can do a main movie backup of several of the Harry Potter movies (keeping the primary audio track only), and the result will fit on a BD25 with room left over. Keeping in mind the length of those movies, and their "compressibility" (action, dark scenes), there's not much bitrate to spare.

A crf 18 constant quality encode of any of the above will not save much space. Surprisingly though, you'll see significant variation (a few GB or so) in "compressibility" even among that limited group. So again, it's essentially unpredictable.

Which is why I think it's wiser to use constant quality encoding rather than setting a target size. Find an acceptable quality level and let the file size be whatever. The exception is encoding to BD25, which is ample space for a main movie backup of an average length movie, IMO. Encoding times don't concern me, as I have a 6-core machine for this and can queue up several encoding jobs at a time to do overnight.

I can certainly see why some people prefer to do a straight rip with no re-encode. I have my original Blu-Rays stored away. If and when I get a 4k 80 plus inch display, I'll look into this again and if necessary go with straight MKV rips on a NAS. As it is, I have most of my Blu-Rays re-encoded in MKV container on several 2 TB external hard drives and can play movies directly with my TV's onboard player.

Originally Posted by wildwolf_ia 

I've just got a 2500k @ 4.4Ghz that I use, but I decided that for me, I wanted uncompressed.

It's quite funny. I have come full circle. Seems about a year ago I was asking about how to get a DVD to compress smaller w/o losing too much quality. Never was happy, so just ripped them straight to ISOs. These were mostly my wife's workout videos (I posted a pic - she's got about 40 or 50 of the things.)

Now, I don't mind at all that I'm pulling BD videos to the hdd as "main movie" copies, then doing an mkv.remux to keep the highest quality possible w/o actually having the disc itself loaded somewhere.

I'm not sure what converted me - but I do think it was the lower cost of drives. Now, I'm looking forward to what the next 5 years will bring in set top player's processing/video capabilities.

However, OP - I do thank you for posting the tips, tricks, and methods you use for your own movies. Reading posts like this does those like me things about the whole process, even if I opt not to use your particular process.