Blu-ray rips vs Original

[imamosher]

I'm thinking about ripping my blu-rays and i'm wondering if you can actually notice a lot of difference between them and the original. I'll be ripping them to MKV.

Do you lose much quality in the ripping process, I know it dpepends on what software you use etc etc. But just how close will the rip be to the original?

Thanks

 

[paulh]

If its MKV it should be the same.

I've not noticed any difference in quality on mine. They are MASSIVE tho. Avatar is about 39gb

 

[oHUTCHYo]

Quite honestly, even a 4GB 1080p Bluray rip looks nice on my 50" Panny G20 Plasma. I play mine through a PS3 so hence the 4GB file limit courtesy of FAT32. You can obviously have them in parts though...

4GB - Looks well, definitely better than a DVD and maintains the vivid colours

8GB - Superb to my eyes

12GB - For the advantage of having all of your movies in digital form at your fingertips, 12GB to me is equal to Bluray unless you really want to impress someone else. For you own watching pleasure, I find it totally acceptable.

All subjective opinion of course, I'm sure others will disagree. Again though, I have a 2TB hard drive with all of my movie collection on there. I love turning on my PS3 and just flicking through my entire library. THAT is the advantage for me.

I tend to reserve the 12GB+ rips for my absolute fave movies such as Alien Quadrology, then 4GB rips for older movies which dont benefit Bluray or movies which I find avergae but still want in my collection.

 

[iamtheoneneo]

4gb rip? dirty dirty....

 

[jellybeard999]

If you don't re-encode them, they should be identical (though it will depend on codecs, player etc how well it deals with playback).

Re-encoded to around 10gb with the original audio (I tend to keep the HD track and either DTS or AC3) original resolution x264 via handbrake is almost indistinguishable from the original though IMO.

 

[celliott]

I rip to MKV and then re-encode using Handbrake (Free app) with RF18 which ends up with files between 8GB - 15GB and they look as good as the originals IMO

 

[Mr_Sukebe]

ok, I admit, I'm confused. Why go to the trouble and expense of bd, then deliberately choose to bugger it up?

 

[Memphis]

Curious that so many people believe ripping your own films is legal .

 

[dazzerd]

I only have a bluray player in my main pc so rip them to mp4 to stream them to my laptop in the front room which ia plugged into my tv.

Mine end up at between 6-8gb and it is virtually impossible to tell the difference and saves having to have 40gb files stuck on my pc.

 

[Phil99]

Curious that so many people believe ripping your own films is legal .

It may not be legal, but are people being immoral by ripping their own BluRays? Absolutely not, there are many advantages to ripping media that do absolutely no harm to anyone else, so while I'm sure people know it's not legal, no-one cares

In response to the original question, it depends on your storage constraints, if you've got tonnes of storage it'll be bit-perfect, otherwise there'll be some quality loss, but most movies are still perfectly fine down to 6-10GB.

 

[cram]

I personally rip to ISO as I find playback easier (less setting up of splitters, ffdshow etc). Though I have done a few to MKV as tests. Personally can't see the point in purposefully making the quality worse by re encoding. Absolutely accept that storage can be a problem but I probably purchase less than 40 blu rays a year so just need to get an additional 2tb each year.

 

[House]

I've was slowly working through ripping all my DVDs (i have allot of films& TV and its not a fast thing to do.) back in the UK, having a media server and just using it as a movie jukebox is great.

Blurays im not so sure the storage required is serious if you want to keep the quality your paying for and my servers just not upto the job yet.

 

[EniGmA1981]

Most of the .mkv rips I've got are around the 2 to 4 gig mark and they look pretty good to me... then again, as I don't actually have a blu ray player yet and have never actually watched a genuine blu ray lol I don't have much else to compare with lol

 

[glenimp617]

This is a subject I know quite well. I've ripped my own personal bluray collection to MP4 using the 64bit version of x264.exe. MP4 was my container of choice as its more widely supported but MKV is ok. They can both contain H264 video and multi channel audio so its up to you. The reason I did it was to watch a few movies on my ipad when working away (hotels in the evenings are boring when on your own) and to make sure the physical discs are hidden as my little boy likes playing with them.

Most new films sit between 30gb-40gb but don't forget they also contain uncompressed audio along with multiple language soundtracks.

Depends on the filesize you are aiming to reach but anything less than around 8gb should ideally be done at 720p. If you don't mind increasing the filesize then of course stick to 1080p.

Mine are 4gb 720p using 5.1 aac audio at 320k bitrate. The movies look almost identical on my 42" V10 Panasonic plasma. If you get off the sofa and look right up at the screen you'd be hard pushed to tell the difference but now and again you can sometimes make out the odd misplaced pixel.

Don't forget to keep the chapters and look for forced subtitles as these are needed now and again. Example is say Star Trek 6 when the klingons are speaking....erm, klingon Check each one when finished as sometimes forced subtitles can be used for other things like the first transformer movie. This one had the forced subtitles for extra material like the making of the CGI transformers.

If you find a movie which does not contain one huge .m2ts file then you have to use HBRextractorGUI (or something like that) and EAC3to to join all the little .m2ts files by going on the playlist for the main movie.

One nice little feature you can do is bu grabbing the coverart from www.cdcovers.cc and adding it in as a poster. This enables windows to show the coverart as a thumbnail which is nice for PS3/AppleTV or just plan windows folder browsing.

Encoding a bluray rip will take a few hours. My PC (see sig for specs) takes around 3hrs a film on 2pass

Ripbot264 is the package I'd recommend for this task. It's a GUI which uses lots of independant tools which are meant to be very good. (x264.exe for example)

p.s. don't forget to make sure normalization is off

 

[oli collett]

ok, I admit, I'm confused. Why go to the trouble and expense of bd, then deliberately choose to bugger it up?

I'm more curious as to what kind of storage solutions people have here! I was looking at upgrading my server to 8tb but even with that i'd struggle to fit all my media on there.

I guess long term it would be useful though

 

[Lunatic Dreyfus]

I go the .ISO route. Any else just seems like a whole lot of aggro, and time.

I dare say I'll acquire a fair collection of 2TB drives going this way , but so far my blu-ray collection is quite small and I'm only on my first dedicated one.

 

[cram]

I'm more curious as to what kind of storage solutions people have here! I was looking at upgrading my server to 8tb but even with that i'd struggle to fit all my media on there.

I guess long term it would be useful though

Couple of thecus nas boxes with total of 16.5 terabytes minus the raid 5 overhead. Probably be about a 18 months before I need to add more space based on current purchasing patterns

 

[Dangerous Dave]

On a large screen it is fairly easy to spot a re-encoded rip of a blu-ray so I do a un-encoded rip to mkv of just the movie keeping the HD audio and subtitles this averages around 20-25gb to a movie with some even as low as 13-16gb.

I have just over 20tb of storage which is pretty much full. The bulk of the storage is on a Synology DS1010 + DX510, my friend works in the storage field and I got these very cheap second hand I just had to add the drives the rest is on a server I built up from old PC parts.