compressing/converting blurays

[stripe123]

Hello everyone,

I have a goal and I would like to Rip and store bluray movies to my hard drives at about 10-15GB per movie including one main movie Video track, one main audio track (either Dolby True HD or DTS True HD) depending on whats available with the Bluray movie and one main subtitle track being english. By the way I am streaming the movies to a PS3 that automatically encodes the movies on the fly while watching them so I would like to use the highest quality codecs/containers there is so that I can preserve the full quality of the sound and as best quality for the video without going over around 15GB please.

So far I have found DVD Fab (with Bluray Support) to decrypt and copy the whole bluray movie to my Hard Disk drive, most movies end up being around 40GG to 50GB in size.

I open up tsMuxer GUI 1.10.6 and go to the streams folder of the rip and select the largest .m2ts file that holds the main movie, all audio and subtitles. I delete all the unnecessary other language subtitles because I want only english, I remove all audio files apart from the main Dolby True HD or DTS True HD audio and keep the main movie only of course. Next I then select the 4.1 Profile if the video is higher or if not then I leave as standard 4.1. I check that the audio setting "downconvert TRUE-HD to AC3" to ensure its not ticked. Next I make sure the subtitle is marked as eng for the language and I select the folder where I would like the raw 1920x1080P movie, Dolby or DTS True HD Audio and English subtitles to go and press Demux.

My file has come down from 40-50GB to only 26.3GB already.

Now at this time I double check each file by dragging them into "MediaInfo" which in tale tells me what the properties are of the Video File, Audio file and Subtitle. I confirm that the movie is called Law Abiding Citizen btw. OK, so it contains a valid movie track that is 23.1GB is a AVC format, 4.1 Profile, 1920x1080P/16.9 at 23.976FPS. The audio is 3.29GB is a AC-3 (TRUE-HD) format, has a variable bitrate of 640Kbps and maximum bitrate of 5544Kbps and contains 6 channels being FL FR FC RL RR and LFE at a sample rate of 48KHz. The Subtitles are 41.9MB and thats all the information it gives.

My first question please:Whats the difference between this variable and maximum bitrate? Also whats the best program to now merge these three RAW files together and compress the video but leaving the Audio/Subtitles intact and untouched

Look guys I really appreciate all of your help and hope to hear from you soon. Thanks

Jamie

[UncasMS]

1)
please be aware that the largest m2ts MAY be the (entire and complete) movie but it is not always the case!
in other words: many titles have their main movie spread over quite a lot of m2ts files. latest title I came across was Sherlock Holmes (Wall-E was the most extreme case).

so you better get yourself BDInfo, load your title into it and note the PLAYLISTfile (mpls) and then open THIS mpls with tsmuxer. you will not only have the whole movie but also correct chapter marks, which will not be present when simply opening an m2ts file although they are of no importance for what you have in mind.

2)
in many cases you will have to compress the video stream so I would skip the first step with tsMuxeR and go directly to BD Rebuilder - this tool will answer all your questions and give you excellent results.

simply load the original (please do NOT temper with the original files in any way and let BD RB do the job!), select movie only, make your choice on audio + subtitle streams, set a custom output size and have BD RB convert your material.

3)
difference between variable and max bitrate should be this: maximum is the peak bitrate and the "variable" should be something like a calculated average bitrate.

BDInfo provides very good statistics btw.

[stripe123]

Hi UncasMS,

Thank you for your information. I have the original still at hand that I ripped to my drive with DVD FAB so I will load that into BD Rebuilder and see how I go. Is there any way i can load the Original rip into BD info it keeps saying its not a valid BD structure.... Unfortunately I dont have the original disc.

Thanks

[UncasMS]

BD RB normally says: no valid structure when you have a subfolder in a subfolder in a....

Navigate to that particular folder which has BDMV and Certificate as next subfolders.

This will work:

Title XYZ
- BDMV
- Certificate



This will NOT:

Title ABC
- Title ABC
-- BDMV
-- Certificate

In the latter case simply open the second folder (marked red)

[stripe123]

Hey UncasMS,


Thanks for that, I managed to get BD Info to see the content from the Hard Drive now .

I tried that BD Rebuilder, I have a couple of concerns regarding the use of it. I loaded the raw Bluray from the HDD to the program, then i set these settings.

Mode>Movie Only Backup is ticked
Mode>Unticked "Quicker" Encode for extras is unticked
Mode>Other Movie Output>Made sure Output BD or AVCHD compliant structure was ticked
Mode>Other Movie Only Output>CRF Value for Alternate Encode to 18. Is this to be used with bluray standard output or Alternate Output because I tried changing this to 15 under BD/AVCHD structure and the size/quality was no different when it finished???.
Settings>encoder>x264 is ticked
Settings>Output Options>Custom Target Size is ticked
Settings>Encoder Settings>Normal Priority is ticked
Settings>Encoder Settings>Highest (very slow) is ticked
Settings>Encoder Settings>One pass CRF Encoding is ticked....Please explain whats the difference between the CRF and ABR settings.
Under Setup I have English Audio/English Subtitles selected, 15000mb as Target Size, Do not convert DTS to AC3 (Bluray only) selected, do not re encode AC3 (Bluray only) selected and keep HD Audio for BD25 encoding selected.

Please bare in mind time is not a problem and I want my Audio to be untouched and only my video to be compressed please.

UncasMS, some other questions I have is I would like to know how do I find out what english subtitle to use there are 5 of them attached to the movie file and that's very confusing because I only want the normal English subtitles just in case someone is talking in another language.

First up I selected a BD structure, selected my movie, my TRUE HD Dolby sound and all 5 subtitles and this is what happened. My Movie was good quality which was a good start, the sound was compressed from 5.5mbps to 3.3mbps but was still Dolby True HD which is good, is there any way to stop the compression? and finally there was no subtitles in the movie when i dragged the movie to VLC, this is because its a Bluray structure right? Because I will not be burning these movies to disc and playing them I require to be able to have all movie/subtitle and audio in the one file so that I can select, drag and play and everything is there, just like a MKV file.

UncasMS, I decided to try and do a MKV file by changing the settings under the mode from BD/AVCHD output to MKV Container, 1920x1080, AC3 Audio. Did myself a backup with the same Video/True HD Dolby/Subtitles and when it finished I compared them both, this was the outcome.

The file was 16.1GB, The Audio was downgraded from TRUE HD DOLBY to AC3 at 640kbps and was all scrambled, The video was good and the subtitles were good to but there was 5 different types of subtitles like directors comments english etc and also the movie said it was apparently 9 hours long and just stopped in the middle LOL. My question is how do I convert the movie to a MKV container with the compressed video, intact plain english subtitle for impairment, keep it at around 15GB and not touch my audio but simply merge it together?

I know thats a lot to take in but I appreciate your help UncasMS. Maybe we could chat on msn and you could step a dummy through it all haha, I work with mainframe and high end server hardware and hate software LOL.

Cheers mate,

Jamie

[UncasMS]

Mode>Other Movie Only Output>CRF Value for Alternate Encode to 18. Is this to be used with bluray standard output or Alternate Output because I tried changing this to 15 under BD/AVCHD structure and the size/quality was no different when it finished???.

I'm not entirely sure but I think changing values here will only have any effect when going for the alternate encoding and not normal avchd/bd structure.

Settings>Encoder Settings>One pass CRF Encoding is ticked....Please explain whats the difference between the CRF and ABR settings.

CRF will analyse more precisely and may give you better quality BUT it also may miss your target size and result in over- or undersize

ABR will use an average bitrate, hit your traget size rather precisely but may turn out slightly poorer in very critical scenes.

BEST quality will be achieved when using 2 pass and not have crf or abr ticked.

On the other hand a 15gb final target size with one HD audio track should provide enough average bitrate for a 1 pass ABR.

If you want to be on the safe side, use highest quality (which will take long even on a quad or hexa-core machine) and two pass but high quality should result in a picture quality no different to highEST when your target size is 15gb. Maybe even good quality will result in identical output.

Under Setup I have English Audio/English Subtitles selected, 15000mb as Target Size, Do not convert DTS to AC3 (Bluray only) selected, do not re encode AC3 (Bluray only) selected and keep HD Audio for BD25 encoding selected.

Please bare in mind time is not a problem and I want my Audio to be untouched and only my video to be compressed please.

I have NOT used a custom size so far but when using BD-25 as output size and those options set you quote your streams should stay untouched.

UncasMS, some other questions I have is I would like to know how do I find out what english subtitle to use there are 5 of them attached to the movie file and that's very confusing because I only want the normal English subtitles just in case someone is talking in another language.

Do yourself a favour and keep ALL english subtitle streams because it is a very difficult task spotting the forced subs (whose that will only be shown when the language spoken in the movie is not your native tongue and thus subtitles are required).

Latest titles like 2012, District 9, Avatar, Angels & Demons and the like sometimes even have those forced subs as part of the normal subtitle stream so you cannot even spot them as a separate stream.
They are flagged and displayed when necessary but in case you only wanted those forced subs you'd have to know exactly which of the many english stream include the forced subs, which is possible (by means of using BDSup2Sub) but it's way more comfortable to simply keep all pgs streams and let the player make its choice.

the sound was compressed from 5.5mbps to 3.3mbps but was still Dolby True HD which is good

This is technically impossible.
In case the audio was compressed/touched it is not an HD stream any longer.

Don't get me wrong: in many cases the DTS core (the extracted but in itself untouched core) of a DTS MA stream may still sound just as good as the original stream, because one would not only need a rather high end AVR AND corresponding speakers but also one would have to be able to actually hear those very minute differences, which many of us simply cannot.

IMHO a good audio stream is defined by the way the stream is mixed but not mastered in the end.
You can have excellent 448/640kbps DD streams which sound way better than any DD/DTS Lossless whatsoever. CF this report from testers at DTS studios.

Because I will not be burning these movies to disc and playing them I require to be able to have all movie/subtitle and audio in the one file so that I can select, drag and play and everything is there, just like a MKV file

I'd rather output to BD structure and use a decent software player for playback from HDD like Arcsoft TotalMedia Theater 3 Platinum.

But of course MPC HC or the like can also play m2ts files from your drive with forced subs:



Since you say your playback is from an HTPC (or whatever): HOW do you stream lossless HD sound / what cable connection do you use?
Do you use an ATI 5xxx or 4xxx or a soundcard like Xonar?

The file was 16.1GB, The Audio was downgraded from TRUE HD DOLBY to AC3 at 640kbps and was all scrambled

Like I said: I have only used the MKV output once for testing and the final size was off spot so I never tried it again.

I'd rather output to BD structure and use a software player later on OR have BD RB output to bd structure and THEN use makemkv to simply create your desired mkv stream within minutes as makemkv does not touch or convert any stream. So no loss of quality and a very fast process.

[UncasMS]

I've searched the Doom9 thread on BD RB once more and so far I could not find any proof that a custom size output in combination with keeping HD is possible.

So if you want an output size of ~15Gb you will have to set BD RB to a custom size of 12-13GB I should think, let BD RB convert the audio to whatever is set and LATER on manually exchange the converted stream with the original HD stream using tsMuxeR.

[stripe123]

Hi UncasMS,

I have decided to give another encode a try with the ABR/CRF settings both unticked to go for your 2 pass setting to achieve best quality as you say. A 2 pass (with nothing ticket) is this a force ABR or CRF 2 Pass or is it called something different, they should stick 2-Pass as a menu setting because I would have never known the software was capable of that is someone like you didnt tell me .

What I am trying at the moment UncasMS is just encoding the Movie and all English Subtitles at a custom size of 13GB. This should give me high quality compressed video and all subtitles with no audio and I will use tsMuxer as you said ealier to add the HD Audio stream to the compressed video. UncasMS, how do you use tsMuxer to pull the Audio from one source and merge it together to another source, I have never done this....

I like to keep my blurays in .MKV format so that I can keep them on my large Hard Drives and stick them into a program called PS3 Media Server which automatically allows me to open my movies under the movies menu in the PS3 and encode/stream/decode on the fly through my Ethernet network. I have a 5970 and 8 Core processor with 8GB of 2000MHZ DDR3 RAM so its quite quick and the quality is very nice including all the content included with the MKV file. I am not sure I can play BD structure through this program thats why I asked you earlier if I could change to MKV because its easier, I find with a bluray structure VLC/Power DVD 10 does not know what a bluray structure is unless its on a BD, is there a way of adding a bluray disc structure from hard drive to VLC/Power DVD 10 so that I can select my subtitles? I am also planning in the future to buy myself a high quality Yamaha TRUE HD Amplifier and speakers so that's why I require high quality sound because there is no point spending over $2500 on a sound system and not having all the crisp quality sounds and surround sound effects with such an expensive surround sound system. I also just got myself a new 55" Samsung LED 3D TV too so that's why i require the video quality to be good because you can tell quite easily and with the ps3 there is no limit to the size of the file I want to send from my PC

UncasMS, when I tried this 2 Pass CRF/ABR (which ever it is called Ill wait for you to explain) The video encoding was much much quicker, with CRF selected it use to take me 3-4 hours to encode a movie and use 100% CPU Power. With CRF/ABR not selected to do your 2 Pass its using 50% CPU power only and is flying in at 1 hour going hard at 35FPS wtf? LOL

[UncasMS]

A 2 pass (with nothing ticket) is this a force ABR or CRF 2 Pass or is it called something different

- ABR uses a calculated average bitrate to achieve the desired final size without analyzing the video stream

- CRF analyzes a certain amount of the video stream and based on that analysis the video will be encoded with the 1-pass conversion

- the two pass system works like this:
pass 1 analyzes every single frame and creates a statistics file based on which the second pass can allocate the best possible bitrate for every frame.

this way a low bitrate frame will only get a minimum bitrate (as opposed to an ABR where it will receive the same bitrate as a frame with way more movement inside the frame which would call for a higher bitrate) and a high action sequence (for example an explosion or an underwater scene) will be allocated more bitrate (as the original frame will already have taken a higher bitrate for these frames or otherwise they will look blocky). This way the bitrate distribution will be adopted to what the single frames call for but of course analyzing every frame with a separate pass takes more time.

how do you use tsMuxer to pull the Audio from one source and merge it together to another source, I have never done this....

1)
in case BD RB has given you a final output, I'd open my original main movie (by opening the corresponding mpls/playlist file) with tsmuxer and only select the very audio stream I want to keep and then use the DEMUX options

this way tsmuxer will demultiplex(demux) i.e. separate the streams you have marked and save them as single streams

2)
- now I'd open the BD RB output with tsmuxer
- deselect/unmark the included (downconverted) audio stream
- add the original audio stream which you have demuxed before (click the stream after adding it and assign the language flag from the drop-down menu)
- save the "new" output to "blu-ray"

3)
use makemkv to create one single file out of the blu-ray structure you have saved

[stripe123]

Hey mate,

Well success haha I have managed to get my movie compressed on my drive to around 12.5GB. I have used TSMUXER to merge the video/audio and instead of taking the audio from the original file i have added the BD RB movie/subtitles and the original movies audio and merged them together to a output BD format through tsmuxer, this saved splitting the original audio and then having to merge them, I can kill two birds with one stone this way.

Now I have a small question, with the nicely compressed video file and subtitles and true HD Dolby Digital I would like to make it to a MKV file, to do this I used that make mkv program, it works nicely too! My question is that the BD RB video/subtitles and TS muxer audio comes in at 14.5GB. When i add this folder to makemkv and tell it to change the container the size comes down to 12.9, 1.6gb of data is going somewhere, do you have any clue uncasMS?



Thanks mate, sorry if I sound confused, a long day at work and I am totally pissed haha

cheers man.

jamie

[UncasMS]

When i add this folder to makemkv and tell it to change the container the size comes down to 12.9, 1.6gb of data is going somewhere, do you have any clue uncasMS?

It's the overhead of m2ts files and it can be up to 50% of the input files - don't worry it's normal.

[UncasMS]

Since your primary goal seems to be playback from harddrive and only ONE file (mkv) you may want to take a look at RipBot264, which may save some steps and perhaps be the better choice in your case.

[stripe123]

Hi UncasMS,

Thanks for the heads up, I was wondering why the file size shrunk so much

Could you please step me through whats required with rip bot 264? I have tried this program before and the reason why I dont use it is not because its no good but because it always compressed my audio and changed the codecs of my audio and I dont want that. Could you tell me how to overcome this?

Thank you

Jamie

[UncasMS]

Sorry, I don't use RipBot264 as it needs a different ffdshow version to what I have installed for BD Rebuilder.

[MilesAhead]

You can get some insight from the author directly on this thread:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=127611