So I'm going to start ripping Blu-ray to the hard drive of my media pc. I have a blu-ray player but I don't use it, we watch everything off the media pc or stream from it to other computers, devices etc. Hard drive space is not an issue, I own a computer company and I have more hard drives then I can use. But having said that I don't need to store all the extras and special features. I need some recommendations on the best program for playing the blu-ray folders. I primarily use XBMC and Media Center Classic neither of which seem to work for blu-ray folders. I could convert to a media container but I don't want to spend the time encoding and I don't want to compress the video or audio. Also for shrinking them, I don't want to compress them in any way but I want to get rid of the junk like previews, extras etc and have movie only. Is there a program that rips the movie without compression but doesn't restrict me to just disk sizes like 25gb?
DVDFab HD allows you to rip blu rays and remove advertisements. If you don't compress the rips a little, you are going to fill up the hard drive really quick. Dvdfab hd allows you to compress blu rays if you want to a smaller size yet still keep the hd format.
I've got stacks of terabyte hd's so no worries on space. I want to maintain the movie uncompressed and preferable in a folder rather then in a container. I don't want to spend the time converting. I'll check out Dvdfab to see if it does this or forces me to a set disk size. I also need to know a good program to play them. I really wish XMBC would play them.
dvdfab hd doesn't force you to set a disc size, you can make it any size you want from 50gb all the way down to 4.7gb if you want. 50gb is uncompressed( 1:1 copy) and 4.7gb (massive compression). If you select 50gb and only rip the main movie it can range from 15gb to 45gb(depending on the movie length). You can play the rips with vlc.
If you want to rip uncompressed just use AnyDVD HD it is much easier and better than Fab. I've played with Fab but use AnyDVD HD with BD-RB which does a much better job than Fab, hands down! TVersity is a pretty good server for audio and video but I haven't tried it with the M2TS movie structure yet.
Here's my suggestion after a steep learning curve. I couldn't get DVDFabHD to work. It looked like the best solution though. I currently use AnyDVD-HD. It simply rips the BD disk structure exactly as it is written. BE AWARE that basically all movie content written on the original disk IS COMPRESSED to some degree. But ripping using AnyDVD won't introduce additional compression. Next, download a utility called HDBrStreamExtractor. Its indispensible for telling you what streams are available in the STREAM folder. It shows you language tracks, subtitles, etc. Quick and easy, and if you want you can use it to extract any stream from your rip. Sometimes I need to extract a specific stream to correct a problem re-encoding a movie with a director's comment etc that gives me trouble. For MOST movies, there will be a single huge file in the STREAM directory which is the main movie. About 95% of the time, simply copy that one to where you want to save it then delete everything else. But a few studios are getting very nasty about breaking up the main movie into dozens of smaller pieces. I have yet to find a good solution for this problem. You're going to find some movies with up to 35GB of file size. It does take extra time to re-encode these to a smaller size, say 12-15GB with a 15000 bitrate. Unless you're projecting onto a screen in excess of 100 inches, you don't need any more bitrate than this, you won't see any degradation in quality. But it can take 5-6 hrs to re-encode a 2hr movie using a fairly fast machine (my system quad core Intel running 3.85GHz and 8GB of PC8500 memory at an FSB of 1700. A real fast disk array will likely help U320 SCSI?). Also check out a real great utility called HandBrake. Of course, probably most movies you want have already been ripped and re-encoded for you, maybe you can just utilize a fast DSL connection and BitTorrent the ones you want. With 12.5mbps you can snag 7-10 HD movies a day if you know how to optimize you UL/DL bandwidth and stack your queue with 50-75 downloads 24/7. Hehehehehe. But even that requires several hrs a day of managing data, renaming files, checking quality, etc. I've been doing this a while, and now have about 800 movies in 720p resolution and 400 in full 1080, plus about 2,400 in SD format on a 16TB server. For a player, d/l VLC which plays the .m2ts fine, and so will Windows Media Player once CCCP is installed (Combined Community Codec Pack, probably the only codecs you'll need.And BTW I gave up on streaming a long time ago as well as media center extenders! VLC is supposed to stream too but I have not tried that feature). Winderz Media Player/Center sucks at handling multiple audio streams and subtitles. Doing your own rips, you have more control over how the container is formatted. Any other questions feel free to rattle my tree. Ray
If you play with Handbrake I would suggest blocking it from going out to the internet which it wants to do always. Hanbrake is OK but I still prefer BD Rebuilder and you'll need ffdshow, avisynth, & Matroska Splitter. CCCP, I would just download ffdshow direct CCCP's wrapper can have nasties in it and I won't personally use it ever again besides it truly is ffdshow. If you want to try a better wrapper of ffdshow you could go with ffdshow + X = ffdshow tryouts.
I agree with most of your comments. I have not tried HD Rebuilder, I'll give it a spin this weekend. I have never had any issues with CCCP. It includs Matroska Splitter and Hali, and ffdshow, plus it will install a few pretty good players. The worst problem I find is that NO player works 100% for everything you rip or download. You can't blame your media, or give up, just learn how to use about 4 good players and one *should* work for that problem file. I hate VLC's interface, but end up using it about 50% of the time because it handles stream switching quite easily. It does have de-interlacing bugs though. Zoom also has good stream control and is very clean and easy. But my preference is WMP *when it works* because it is so simple and quick to pause and full-screen. One thing, with an HTPC you really need keyboard and ESPECIALLY mouse control at your seat, so get a radio NOT IR enabled unit as IR must be direct sight and has very limited range. I think this thread is heading off-topic, but there's so many factors to making this stuff work well, and the answers are often scattered all over the place making it difficult to get good answers.
With DVD-IFO and MKV / M2TS / AVCHD (MPEG-2 & MPEG-4) I really don't have problems playing them when using TMT3 or TMT5 I've also used PowerDVD too and it works well. I can use WMP as well with codecs installed but like you said it can be buggy. For all other files with exception to Flash (FLV) I use WMP and it works well as my default player, like you I prefer WMP too. Now again you need ffdshow codecs for WMP to be able to handle all of the different container types. For Flash I use three players because FLV's can be so poor in their adherence to standards. Like you I use VLC but I also use FLVPlayer4Free as my primary when WMP doesn't work on FLV's, about 50% of the time. I set WMP as my default FLV player and revert to FLVPlayer4Free, and then VLC if things go south. To get WMP to play flash files you need a codec plugin, I use PlayFLV and it works pretty well. Now if I need to change a different region movie to a new region then I use tsMuxeR & eac3to to seperate the audio and video, convert the video and remux the two back together. I could use Handbrake for some of this but am used to tsMuxeR Of course this is way outside of the subject here. Also TVersity should work for HD content as well as SD, music and pictures as a server but again I haven't played with M2TS files yet. YouTube, Huluand so on it works pretty well once you get through a few hurdles. Download TVersity Pro 1.9.3
Have a gander at this thread not sure if it's xbmc for windows or linux,there is a stand alone version of xbmc that can be installed rom the sabayon install disc so XBMC becomes it's own OS,loks real choice on an hd screen,only downside is the bloody thing can't read NTFS it can however read fat or ext,according to one of the lasts posts linux supports BR,yeah well it might be worth a look xbmc definitly freak'n rocks http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=43809
Actually I didn't see where it said it couldn't handle NTFS, and Linux can now, if NTFS is not native to the distro it can definately be patched. If their port to Windows works there is no reason that they would have a problem with NTFS unless they are running a Linux shell under Windows? It looks like they can read ISO's which would make life easy but if that is the case then why are they worried about the newer movies that break up the M2TS files. All they would need to do is read the index file in the BDMV folder, I'm missing something there. I thought XBMC had gone away since I haven't really heard anything about them in some time. Interesting!
Nah the bit about not being able to read ntfs is on the standalone version from the sabayon install disc,it's what i have installed & is not on that site,however you mention it can be patched if it can then i have some homework to do,i thought it was strange ntfs wasn't supported with their version of xbmc XBMC is still being worked on it supports all platforms,the only one that isn't is for the xbox which is now updated by SVN or whatever it's called,yeah anyway here's the link to xbmc site http://xbmc.org/
Great info guys, thanks for the discussion. This really reminds me of DVD when dual layer disks were too expensive and everybody was trying to figure out how to put everything on one 4.3gb disk lol There was a million ways to do it. When dvdshrink came along it was a dream. I shrunk a lot of disks to fit on 4.3gb and later for on my media server. But I found down the road I wished I had maintained the DVD's in a higher quality rather then shrinking and compressing them. It would have given me more options later with out having to go back to the disk. So that's ultimately my goal here, keep it simple and maintain the movie at the original quality while getting rid of the bloat they put on the disk to save space for more movies. Down the road I can do whatever I want with them knowing I have the highest quality source. Of course then to be able to play it. I don't mind using whatever media player works and with downloaded stuff, yeah whatever works is good enough. But the kids and wife just want to play it not find Dad and ask him which player plays which movie. That's why I love XBMC. Simple and just plays most anything including iso's which is sweet. When XBMC can play a Blu-ray iso or folder ripped right from the disk it'll be sweet. I did try DVDFab to rip just the movie with no compression and it was really fast. My only issue is with VLC and Media player classic if I moved around in the movie at all the player froze and took a while to catch up. Not sure if that is a player problem or just the pc I was using being bogged down.
I use Arcsoft Totalmedia Theater for playing blu-ray, and HD-DVD ripped to folders. By far the best HD media player for PC. It is not free, though. Excellent integration with MCE & "My Movies" plugin.
VLC Media Player or Media Player Classic HomeCinema.You dont want to compress them,i suggest you ByteCopy Blu ray to MKV.Lossless copy Blu ray to MKV.I play the output MKV file via VLC which enables me choose sub,language,chapter.
There is no such thing as Blu-Ray DVD or DVD structure of Blu-Ray in a folder. You either have DVD-IFO structure in a folder or on disc, or you have Blu-Ray (BD) disc or folder, but you could have AVCHD on DVD's or in a folder too. Most people that compress Blu-Ray Disc's to AVCHD-DVD's refer to them as BD5 or BD9's.
Hmm. So, if I use anydvd hd to rip the contents of my blu ray disk onto the hard drive, and then burn the contents of that back onto a recordable blu ray, I can play it in a regular set top box blu ray player? or should I turn it into some type of mkv file? How will I know which mkv will be playable in my set top type box (manufactureres don't list that on the advertisements)? Or is it just trial and error?
If you use AnyDVD-HD to rip your Blu-ray to your HDD you can do so in two manners. MODE #1 1) Rip as a ISO file in which you can burn the ISO to a new BD-R of equal or greater size. This probably means you need a BD50 disc as more than often Blu-ray movies are larger then a BD25 can handle. MODE #2 2) Rip as a disc file structure to your HDD which will do the same thing but you will be able to compress the movie so that you'll be able to burn to a BD25 disc, or if it doesn't require compression you can still just use IMGBurn to burn it to a BD25 as well. If you need to compress the movie you will need to download and install all of the required files for BD Rebuilder (BD-RB). You can do this from the following link; BD Rebuilder Download With BD-RB you can also compress the movie to fit on a DVD5 or DVD9 but you will still need a Blu-ray player to play it and the quality won't be as good plus compatibility can also be an issue. -or- You can use DVDFab which will do everything for you and can be better for novices but doesn't do quite as nice of a job as BD-RB does. There is a free version and I think it will do Blu-ray as well as DVD's but for sure the paid version can do both. DVDFab Download Hope that helps...
