www.makemkv.com

MakeDVD is fantastic. I can rip DVD's and Blu Ray's to MKV without fail and the quality is perfect.

However, there is one thing I don't understand. I have just ripped Pulp Fiction to my hard drive using MakeMKV and it took 40 minutes to give me a massive 30Gb file that is no use to me whatsoever. It's just too big! So, many people on this forum recommend using Handbrake to compress the file which I have tried. Yes it works very well but it took another two hours to get a smaller file.

OK but, there are many other rippers/converters available that will rip a blu ray to MKV in 40 minutes and give a file size of around 6Gb. I do it all the time! So, without meaning to be rude, what is the point of MakeMKV? Am I missing something? Is the quality better when you use MakeMKV and Handbrake? Why doesn't MakeMKV have a function to compress the file size?

Some people might say that hard drives are cheap so why compromise on quality with transcoding?

Some people might say that transcoding is best handled by awesome software that already exists.

Some people might say that having MakeMKV do what it does very well, is more important than having it do more than it does, but doing it poorly.

SC

I think you'll find the majority of people that use MakeMKV want the 30GB files for ultimate quality, but don't want the Blu-ray container or all the extras and other fripperies that purely waste disk space.

It's the same reason why I'd never consider ripping my CDs to MP3.

Another reason can be that sometimes, some movies do not get smaller, but get bigger, when "compressed."

SC

Let's see... MakeMKV is pretty flexible about what it reads, and I can use the results to feed other programs that aren't so flexible...

A friend of mine also can't see the point of MakeMKV, when Handbrake does just what he needs. His needs did not, until about two hours ago, include dealing with Bluray disks. And it rarely involves ripping 2, 3, or 50 disks in quick succession (Sometimes I go a bit overboard with the sale items at RightStuf.com ). So the ability to get the physical media rip out of the way and have time to queue the later conversion to MP4 files did not seem important to him. Nor is the ability to off-load that task to a computer that doesn't have the computing horsepower to do a VC-1 to h264 conversion at more than 2 FPS, but can rip a BD at 6x speed, seem important.

That changed today. His nice speedy iMac doesn't do BD, and it will cost significantly less to make the Dell next to it rip BD than the iMac. The Dell sucks at Handbrake, though, so MakeMKV now fits his situation a lot better than it did this morning. Especially after he finds out that ripping to an MKV before using HB gives him a lot more options to experiment with different settings without keeping the media loaded in the drive than he's used to having....