Another Bluray Ripping Thread..
#1
So I recently purchased an Asus bluray reader (and writer) with the intent of ripping some of my critical blurays to a 4TB Seagate drive that I have connected to my Netgear R7000 USB port (poor man's NAS for now).

I want to be able to watch the blurays from devices within my house (Pivos XBMC player, HTPC with XBMC). Retaining the lossless audio and video is pretty paramount for me as I've invested considerably in my video/audio system.

I've tried to read online and it appears there are tons of "recommended" routes. MakeMKV. MakeMKV followed by Handbrake (possibly to reduce the file I assume?). AnyDVD. ClownBD, etc. etc.

I've been experimenting thus far with just MakeMKV as well as then taking the MKV file and encoding it using Handbrake into a M4V file and decided to try the film I am Legend. This quickly started to get confusing. E.g., ignoring the multitude of video options (I just left it at 1080p and 20 as the default to try it out) the audio then became that much more confusing. Do I select AAC Passthrough, DTS-HD with AAC passthrough, etc. Ultimately I tried AAC Passthrough and when I played the bluray via my Pivos box I could only get Dolby Digital from my Processor (Integra DHC-80.3) when I wanted to retain the original DTS-HD recording so clearly chose the wrong one. Video looked pretty good, though I started wondering if it was a bit soft. So I then simply copied the original 15GB .mkv file that MakeMKV created, and tried playing that but it was just constantly stuttering in the Pivos Box (wondering if this is hardware related as it doesn't stutter on my laptop).

I then read up some more, and came away more confused about whether to keep an ISO file (and possibly use some sort of external player in XBMC?), keep the mkv container, etc etc.

In any event, before I keep ripping along, is there a recommended way to preserve the video and lossless audio of the bluray?

Is AnyDVD that much better than say MakeMKV and/or Handbrake? The cost really doesn't bother me if it is. I'm just looking to be able to rip blurays in a fashion where 1 or 2 years from now I say to myself "crud, I should have done it this way instead as I'm losing video and/or audio quality". It takes hours to rip a bluray (I'm using a ~2010/2011 Arrandale i7-640 based laptop for this at the moment), so ideally just doing it right the first time is of obvious importance! Smile

Or is this whole post just nonsense as there is no "right" way of doing it?
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#2
There's no right or wrong.

Personally I think mkv is the best container format and if you want 1:1 exact copies of original video and audio tracks with no compression then MakeMKV is probably the best tool for this.
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#3
So you're saying essentially leave the MakeMKV file as is?

The only question from there would become the stuttering I'm seeing in the video when I play it off my router. Seems to play the video in slow motion and the audio is way ahead of the video even when connected directly via ethernet cable (vs just wireless to rule out wireless latency issues).

Also, while I'm asking, I just did a MakeMKV of Man of Steel and didn't adjust the file. When I run it in XBMC, the audio comes up as DTS-HS MA, but in 5.1 vs the 7.1 the disc has?
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#4
If hard disk space is not a concern then yes leave the MakeMKV file as is and you have an exact copy of the original, personally with cost of storage being so cheap I'd rather invest time in that rather than waste time re-encoding to save space.

Your stuttering issue could be incorrect audio passthrough settings, assuming you have passthrough turned on what happens when you disable passthrough?

As for only seeing 5.1 when ripping a 7.1 audio source, how are you verifying this? use MediaInfo to verify file properties then if connected to an AVR use the received speaker layout to verify XBMC is passing 7.1 audio. Don't rely on the XBMC GUI as currently XBMC can't correctly identify the number of channels in a DTS-MA track so instead reports the 5.1 layout of the DTS Core even if the file contains 7.1 audio, note that it's only a GUI issue and that XBMC will still playback the 7.1 audio.
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#5
Thanks, humorously I just read through the 5.1 vs 7.1 "cosmetic p*ssy sh*t" thread. Smile

So the stuttering of video could be due to incorrect audio passthrough settings? Will check on that and use Mediainfo to see what the file properties are...

Tx!

Here is the Mediainfo shot for Frozen, so looks like the full 7.1 (8 channel) audio mix is in the file?

Image
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#6
If you do want to compress the files with handbrake, don't change the audio at all.

For example, if the original audio is DTS-HD choose audio codec "DTS-HD passthru".

The screenshot you show above has a 8 channel DTS-MA track, so that is as good as it will get.

Stuttering could be because you are using your router as a nas. Whilst most routers are OK at casual serving of files (eg your word docs or reading pdfs) they are often incapable of the sustained throughput needed for serving a high bitrate media file. You can test that by transferring the file to local storage (ie the hard drive on your PC XBMC machine) and playing it. Observe the stuttering or lack thereof and draw a conclusion.

Could also be misconfigured audio settings in XBMC, eg trying to push DTS-HD/MA through a chipset that doesn't support it, or to an amp that doesn't support it.
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#7
Have you tried DVDFab?. Simple and easy to use. Haven't come across a disc it couldn't rip.

It can preserves the original file formats so a DVD is copied into its video-ts format and bluray into mt2s format. All work fine. You can choose which audio streams to keep or discard.

It doesn't seem to get a lot of mention here at xbmc, but it works fine for my library.
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