Backing up & shrinking Bluerays

thethirdnut Wrote:Yea, try RF = 19 or even 20; might shave off some more time for you. I subjectively can't tell between original and HB's output at 19 on a 58" plasma up close.

Ya, I admit it's very likely overkill. I just dread ending up like I did with my MP3 at some point wondering oh why did I rip at such a crappy bitrate while doing them all over again!

I may try a few others settings and see how it looks. Playing with BDinfo now BTW. Not seeing where I can figure out one track from another I'm afraid. I CAN see the different tracks but figuring out that one is the say Theatrical vs the Director vs the Unrated not so much. Playing them and looking at times would work though - if I had BD playback software on this machine :o I usually just go for the longest track but now with the ability to do branches I'm wanting more.

I have read that in order to support BD menus some sort of license has to be purchased. Since the menus are Java, I thought, this really confuses me. I and likely the original poster, sure wish this was more like ripping a standard DVD!

I only use BDInfo when I have to. The BR which contain the Theatrical + Director's Cut, etc and you have several dozen smaller m2ts files versus just one large one as with most movies.

--- Below is for people who don't use TSMuxer much; disregard if you do ---

Pick the *.mpls file you think is the movie you want and then load that into TSMuxer...will be under <movie>/BDMV/PLAYLIST...it can load those playlist files in addition to m2ts files, etc if you weren't aware of this.

Once TSMuxer loads your selected *.mpls file it'll show you any more extra crap to strip off like separate director commentary audio and/or video...If not sure if this is correct mux the selected streams to a new m2ts file...if that works then use that as your source for the rest of the transcoding, etc.

Long-winded way to do it yes; but it works.

PS: I only take one version of whatever movie...usually the longest...only exception for me is Apocalypse Now + Apocalypse Now Redux. I really do consider those almost two different movies so I just created both. ;-)

I have a question about movies with multiple versions. I was copying my Toy Story movie, using Handbrake with Bluray support, it picks the first longest title automatically. After it finished encoding I perused the movie to make sure it was a good copy. I happened along one scene that had a Magic 8 Ball and the answer was written in French, the spoken language was still English. I checked the original Bluray using TMT3 and this time the answer was in English, odd.

So I went back to Handbrake and looked at the titles. There are 3 long titles in this movie. Two, say numbers 120 and 121 ( I don't remember exactly ) are exactly the same length, one has the 8 ball answer in French, the other it is in Spanish. There is also a third title that is a few minutes shorter than these two, say number 15, and it has the answer in English.

Long story short I copied the movie three times, and finally got the right version. There were also other scenes that had foreign writing in them. But I only happened upon this quirk by accident.

Is there some way to check for these movie additions and know that I am getting the right version of the film?

I don't know if there is an easy way via the 3rd party tools we're using. I'm assuming an actual BR player will map the relevant Eng, Francais or Spanish stream based on player preferences/settings for default language. Those details are obviously stored in the playlist info or elsewhere, but I'm not sure where it could be accessible through the ripping avenue.

I also ran into this with Toy Story 3. Audio stream was correct English, but I saw a lot of French text substituted into the movie in certain places.

I very briefly considered fixing this, but shortly after decided against it since it'll allow me to gain credit for my children's cosmopolitan upbringing. ;-)

thethirdnut Wrote:<snip>

PS: I only take one version of whatever movie...usually the longest...only exception for me is Apocalypse Now + Apocalypse Now Redux. I really do consider those almost two different movies so I just created both. ;-)

Going to have to explore TSMuxer a bit, I am sure I have it but I suspect the GUI I'm using is insulating me from it or my workflow just doesn't use it.

That said - WRT to multi-version movies... I too have usually just taken the longest one. However I learned some time ago that Matroska can do seamless branching much like BluRay does! I was never ever able to figure out how to do this until recently finding a tool named Xin1 that handles this. It gets a little complex as a workflow but the author is open to suggestions for improvements. I'm still learning but in your example of Apocalypse Now chances are you could have saved a bunch of space if the versions shared any video. Unfortunately ffmpeg has been slow to support this (surprise) and XBMC doesn't yet have an interface as they're waiting on ffmpeg. A thread discussing it is here -> http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=55764 IMO it's worthwhile if you've got multiple versions of movies around like I do!

P.S. I encoded using -19 for quality vs -17 and gained just 3FPS lol. That said it was also a gig smaller!
I will also likely have the SAME issue with Toy Story -argh! Not watched it yet but I can see I'll be pulling it to rip again!

I'll check out Xin1. Thanks.