[croaker978]

I have ~65 BD .ISO's on 2 1.5 TB drives, drive space is cheap and so I was willing to keep on keepin on. However using Media browser and TMT3 platinum in win7 mce is kind of a pain. The lag between mounting the iso sometimes causes issues and overall there is just a lot of tweaking involved constantly and wife aggro was growing. So I decided I would take another look at using h.264 in a mkv container. I downloaded RipRobot264 as it seemed the most painless to get my feet wet with and went from there.


So here is the point of the post, last night I converted kill bill vol1 to .mkv, it went from 24.5 gig to 4.7gig. When I checked the sizes this morning I thought maybe I had over compressed and was expecting a fairly pixellated POS version of the movie. Imagine my surprise when I put it up on the projector and found the quality was (to my eyes) about what I saw from the BD disk/iso. My question is what am I missing? TANSTAAFL and all that... this seems to be a bit too good to be true.... so is it?


My thought is that I would like to use WD TV Live all over the house fed from one central storage location. And I will be collecting more BD/Videos so I wouldn't need a full server set up.


I guess it doesn't really matter I could always just re-rip to ISO if at some point I am unsatisfied with the image quality. But if I could get basically my whole BD collection on around .5 TB that would be outstanding.

 

[bimmerfreak0]

One big difference is you are burning only the movie (no menus or special features) and H264 is a very efficient codec....


I will say though that most of the time for 1080p I see their sizes around the 6-10gb size, not 4-5....When I convert to 720p that is when they are 4-5...


I think if you pushed the compression a little less it would help out...shoot for 8-10 on average (obviously for a 2 hour movie...)

 

[stanger89]

I just rip my BDs to their native folder structure (movie only, via Clown_BD) and play them with my SageTV extenders. No futzing with ISO, no wasting time re-encoding and having to check if the quality is OK.

 

[croaker978]

Thanks for the reply bimmer, I checked and media info reports 1080P maybe using only one sound track and no subtitle tracks is the difference?

 

[croaker978]

thanks stanger, I am more looking to go with the WD TV Live or Xtreamer for a front end.

 

[tmservo]

If you haven't, you might look at makemkv.com. I just started with it. Pretty incredible. No recompression or changes, hell it can keep the lossless tracks (which isn't really worth it to me) but just sucks everything into an MKV.. insanely fast.


I had also been storing all ISOs, but after I played with it, I switched. Just made life easier, especially since I like to browse in MediaBrowser.


And, it still accomplishes my key goals: moving my investment (original media) up onto shelves and away from kids

 

[MonoPestoso]



Quote:
If you haven't, you might look at makemkv.com. I just started with it. Pretty incredible. No recompression or changes, hell it can keep the lossless tracks (which isn't really worth it to me) but just sucks everything into an MKV.. insanely fast.

That is what I started using. Works perfectly and it is free for now.


I am just waiting for the popbox to come out for my frontend.

 

[tmservo]

I'd agree the front end is really basic. But damn, it works.

 

[Tom_L]

FWIW, I would check your settings in MediaBrowser, TMT3, etc. I use VCD's daemon.exe for mounting, and on the 100+ BD .iso's in my library, there has never been an issue mounting and starting playback automatically with TMT3 through MB. All of my .iso's still have the protection in them, meaning AnyDVD has to do it's thing as well. It might be worthwhile to investigate a bit more what is going on there. Granted, it takes a few seconds to mount, etc before TMT3 starts playing, but not once have I had to get off the couch and grab a keyboard or mouse because of a hang, error, etc. I would say about 10-15 seconds max from clicking "play" in MB to TMT3 10-ft interface splash screen.


I'd check my settings for you, but I'm currently in China. IIRC, a big impact on my setup had to do with checking "play automatically" under the iso mounting section of MediaBrowser's configuration. Before that, 7MC would sometimes throw up an error before TMT3 would start. That one checkbox made a huge difference.


Hope that helps.

 

[croaker978]

@Tom_L thanks I will check that box and see if that corrects the issue. I ripped my .iso's with no protection to avoid the issue with anyDVD. One other thing that I neglected to include was that my BD's are on mapped network drives currently. I dont have a NAS or SAN currently just an enclosure with a couple of drives in JBOD.


@Monopestoso & Tmservo I tried MakeMKV but I do want to try a little compression and I couldnt figure out if it would do that. If I find I want a 1 to 1 I will definitely use that as it looks really straightforward.

 

[hirent]



Quote:
Originally Posted by Tom_L /forum/post/18195336


I use VCD's daemon.exe for mounting, and on the 100+ BD .iso's in my library, there has never been an issue mounting and starting playback automatically with TMT3 through MB. All of my .iso's still have the protection in them, meaning AnyDVD has to do it's thing as well.

Same here.

Using MB and ISOs are mounted using Daemon Tools Lite. Works without a hitch and I've replicated this many times for friends & family.


Just curious; why keep the protection when you rip them? AFAIK, AnyDVD automatically removes protection unless you specifically check the box to keep it. Any advantage to the method?


OP: you might want to read up about BD Rebuilder. Its a great program which can compress a Blu-Ray to; BD-25, DVD-9 or DVD-5 without any discernible loss in quality. DVD-9 & 5 can only have DVD audio tracks not HD quality.

 

[Artslinger]

I believe I read over at the Slysoft forum that some BR titles that are ripped will not work without protection. All you need to do in that case is have AnyDVD HD running when you launch the ISO file with protection.

 

[tmservo]



Quote:
Originally Posted by croaker978 /forum/post/18195451



@Monopestoso & Tmservo I tried MakeMKV but I do want to try a little compression and I couldnt figure out if it would do that. If I find I want a 1 to 1 I will definitely use that as it looks really straightforward.

It's true that it does nothing to change the video or audio, keeping it exactly as it is (1:1) so there is that. However, you do get the effect of a sort in compression in that you can store just the film alone (sans extras) and strip out the extra soundtracks (other languages) which can result in a much smaller file.


So, instead of giving up 50G you give up 35. If you want to compress the video, then yes, this isn't for you. But I guess I'm not in that camp. I want to keep perfect video.. which is why to now I've just stored ISO, but this gives me a chance to keep that.. uncompressed video.. and still save space by removing soundtracks/extras.

 

[Servicetech571]

H264 rocks. I've seen BD compressed to ridiculous amounts (2GB for a 2hr movies) and still look considerably better than an SD DVD. Quality is similar to HD broadcast through cable/sat.

 

[croaker978]



Quote:
Originally Posted by Artslinger /forum/post/18195577


I believe I read over at the Slysoft forum that some BR titles that are ripped will not work without protection. All you need to do in that case is have AnyDVD HD running when you launch the ISO file with protection.

I am saving my .ISO's with out protection and am able to play them on my windows 7 htpc without having AnydvdHD installed at all.


didn't get a chance to check the autoplay checkbox last night as I was at a club seeing Flogging Molly... great band by the way.

 

[Artslinger]



Quote:
Originally Posted by croaker978 /forum/post/18196821


I am saving my .ISO's with out protection and am able to play them on my windows 7 htpc without having AnydvdHD installed at all.


didn't get a chance to check the autoplay checkbox last night as I was at a club seeing Flogging Molly... great band by the way.

You wouldn't need AnyDVD HD if you rip out the protection.


Did you read my post?

 

[Petoria_]

I use rip my blurays with clownbd and anydvd hd to iso files and play them using xbmc. There's a way you can auto mount and play the bluray iso and have it true HD audio. Just use clownbd to extract the audio and video stream you want and it will create an iso for you using imgburn. And with xbmc, you can for the thread to get it auto mount and play when the iso is chosen. I have this setup and it works like a charm


id link you but it's not letting post a link yet

 

[Petoria_]

I use rip my blurays with clownbd and anydvd hd to iso files and play them using xbmc. There's a way you can auto mount and play the bluray iso and have it true HD audio. Just use clownbd to extract the audio and video stream you want and it will create an iso for you using imgburn. And with xbmc, you can follow this thread to get it auto mount and play when the iso is chosen. I have this setup and it works like a charm


XBMC auto mount/play: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=65556

 

[croaker978]



Quote:
Originally Posted by Artslinger /forum/post/18197027


You wouldn't need AnyDVD HD if you rip out the protection.


Did you read my post?

Apparently I didn't, and though I would like to blame it on some combination of hangover, scotch and vicodin.... it wasn't. I assumed you were an earlier poster replying to the question of why they ripped with the copyright protection still in there and missed either the reading or comprehension portion of the post