Can I make a 1 to 1 back up of a UHD w/dolby vision and burn that to a new disc? How?

[sidetracked]

I've been using MakeMKV for a long time to back up my DVDs and BRs. I do that as safe keeping as I have a big collection, and great, rare discs can become impossible to replace.

But I'm a newby with 4K back-ups. Just got a 4K capable drive and it's been working great to make backup/safety MKV files that play back with HD10. But for discs that have dolby vision, the DV gets lost on my system. I know that's a known issue.

I wondered if I did a straight 1 to 1 backup of the whole disc with MakeMKV and then burned the result to a 100G BDXL, would that new disc have dolby vision that would play on any dolby vision compatible system? And if so, how would I do that?

I tried creating a straight, decrypted back-up of a Dolby Vision 4K disc (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy). I got a single folder with the name of the film. Inside that folder there were 3 things: 1) A 'MAKEMKV' folder with sub-folders CMAP and AACS and a discattd.dat file. 2) The BDMV file and 3) a CERTIFICATE folder with a subfolder 'BACKUP' and a 'id.bdmv' file.

What would be my next step? I tried burning the whole folder to a BDXL, and got a disc that my Oppo 203 rejected as 'Unknown Disc'.

As a further experiment, I then created a regular MKV of just the main feature with MakeMKV. Mediainfo showed that as having Dolby Vision, but when I burned it to a BDXL, or when I played it through a hard drive over USB into the Oppo, I again only got HD10 (though I was pleased to see both methods did play fine otherwise on the Oppo, which confirmed that my back-ups of DV discs were working and playable, just without DV...)

Any suggestions of what I should try? Or is this whole concept a bad idea, and I won't end up with a dolby vision back-up anyway?

Thanks in advance for any help, thoughts or advice!

[dcoke22]

With regular blu-rays, you'd normally use something like imgburn to create the necessary blu-ray filesystem to go onto a disc.

I don't personally burn much of anything to optical disc these days. From reading this forum, I gather that finding high quality media to burn things onto is a difficult task.

I would guess your energy would be better spent storing your discs properly to maximize their longevity. And if you're really worried about some rare discs, perhaps buy a second copy.

I think for most, once they get the bits off their disc so they can watch without the disc, they're happy.

[Coopervid]

I've been using MakeMKV for a long time to back up my DVDs and BRs. I do that as safe keeping as I have a big collection, and great, rare discs can become impossible to replace.

But I'm a newby with 4K back-ups. Just got a 4K capable drive and it's been working great to make backup/safety MKV files that play back with HD10. But for discs that have dolby vision, the DV gets lost on my system. I know that's a known issue.

I wondered if I did a straight 1 to 1 backup of the whole disc with MakeMKV and then burned the result to a 100G BDXL, would that new disc have dolby vision that would play on any dolby vision compatible system? And if so, how would I do that?

I tried creating a straight, decrypted back-up of a Dolby Vision 4K disc (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy). I got a single folder with the name of the film. Inside that folder there were 3 things: 1) A 'MAKEMKV' folder with sub-folders CMAP and AACS and a discattd.dat file. 2) The BDMV file and 3) a CERTIFICATE folder with a subfolder 'BACKUP' and a 'id.bdmv' file.

What would be my next step? I tried burning the whole folder to a BDXL, and got a disc that my Oppo 203 rejected as 'Unknown Disc'.

As a further experiment, I then created a regular MKV of just the main feature with MakeMKV. Mediainfo showed that as having Dolby Vision, but when I burned it to a BDXL, or when I played it through a hard drive over USB into the Oppo, I again only got HD10 (though I was pleased to see both methods did play fine otherwise on the Oppo, which confirmed that my back-ups of DV discs were working and playable, just without DV...)

Any suggestions of what I should try? Or is this whole concept a bad idea, and I won't end up with a dolby vision back-up anyway?

Thanks in advance for any help, thoughts or advice!

sidetracked as a forum name pretty much reflects what you are doing

Forget BDXL. There is only one standalone player that can play those. A few can if you only use 66GB of the 100GB but this is a waste of money. And most BDRs available have all issues at the layer break and stutter is almost certain. There are ways to prevent this stutter using "spare areas" but that's another topic. If you are interested, PM me.
Only 50GB discs can be played by all standalone players. So you need to compress to 50GB or less.

Oppos don't play DolbyVision from a MKV. So you need to rip to folder or convert this folder to ISO if you have patched Oppo firmware.

In a nutshell: Forget about burning to disc and store to and play from HDD. That's what I do since a long time. It's safer, cheaper and more convenient.

[flojo]

Yeh you need to stop burning things.

I've been running from disks since Xbox Media Player and would never go back to burning discs to watch. ~22 years ago you could buy a Xbox used for $100usd and connect it directly to your network and TV. Today you can buy a device for $100usd and connect it directly to your network and TV... not much has changed ~22 years :-/.

http://openmediavault.org/ is a good GUI NAS distro, especially since it runs directly on Debian (a _LOT_ of software runs on Debian).

[sidetracked]

Really appreciate all the thoughtful replies. And to be clear, I don't normally burn my back up MKV files (blu-ray or DVD) back to disc, I generally play them off a hard drive or jump drive through USB on my players and that works fine.

But when I started reading about MKV files not working well/easily to play back UHDs with DV, I started trying to think about back up solutions that might get around the issue -- so I thought of the 1 to 1 burned back up disc approach I asked about - but you all have convinced me that's not going to work.

My follow up question is, what's the best way -- or IS there even any GOOD way -- to create a back up file that can play back DV, and will have a chance to continue to work over years on a variety of players? In a perfect world, I'd love to not create a file that can only work on one player, in a universe where players break, companies go out of business, etc.

Should I be creating ISO files, not MKV? I'm on Mac, is there a good program for that?

I'll freely admit I'm far from tech-smart. When I'm lucky I can stumble my way through things, but tech has never become a second language for me, and now I'm an old dog trying to learn new tricks. A sentence like 'good GUI NAS distro, especially since it runs directly on Debian' leaves me feeling like a 5 year old sitting at the grown-ups table.

[flojo]

... leaves me feeling like ...

You want hardware that connects to your network that acts as just storage drive.

You find this is called a Network Attached Storage (NAS) and you then build or buy NAS hardware.

You now install software like the operating system, file system support, etc. and get it working.

Now you have a computer that sits alone in a basement or closest that serves solely to server files like movies or anything a drive does.

Later you want to add things to your NAS for some reason, like a game server or software to download things or whatever. At this point the NAS's operating system may or may not be limiting you. Debian has large software support and this is good for 2 reasons. 1. the probability is high for whatever software you want to add to work. 2. there is a lot of help documentation/webpages found on the internet.

You could also not have a NAS and simply share a directory on your computer and access it over the network. Whatever you do, you really should stop burning videos to a disc.

[dcoke22]

My follow up question is, what's the best way -- or IS there even any GOOD way -- to create a back up file that can play back DV, and will have a chance to continue to work over years on a variety of players? In a perfect world, I'd love to not create a file that can only work on one player, in a universe where players break, companies go out of business, etc.

At the moment, the only way to get full DV support is to run CoreElec on the right hardware, something like the Ugoos AM6B+. The good folks over at CoreElec have figured out how to play DV profile 7 (the kind of Dolby Vision that comes on a disc; Dolby Vision profile 5 is what is used when you stream something from iTunes or whatever with DV) on certain Amlogic SoCs. Just like Apple makes their own System-on-a-Chip (SoC) that goes in their phones, a company called Amlogic makes various SoCs that get used in many brands of Android streaming boxes. The CoreElec software supports certain variants of the Amlogic SoCs to provide full DV playback of a UHD ripped to a .mkv file with MakeMKV. I would guess, although I don't know, that additional variants of Amlogic's chips will be supported in the future and eventually other software besides CoreElec will have support for this functionality. And hopefully, SoCs from other vendors will eventually be supported.

CoreElec is based on Kodi. I've never used Kodi, but it is a lot like Plex, which might be something you've heard of. Plex and its brethren catalog and organize your movie and TV show files and stream them to people watching on your local network. There are lots of ways to run a setup like this, but the most common way is to run a server somewhere in your house that holds all of your movies. Then, at your TV, a streaming box of some kind accesses those movies across the local network and displays them.

flojo was talking about a NAS. When you start down this road, you eventually get to a spot where you'd like more storage than you can get from a single hard drive. So you end up with a computer that specializes in managing multiple disks and then makes storage available on your network. You can choose something like a Synology or a QNAP that uses purpose built hardware and proprietary software to manage the disks and share them on the network or you can use a regular computer with a bunch of drives shoved in it and software like Open Media Vault, TrueNAS, or Unraid, just to name a few. Either way, now you've got a NAS server. The next logical thing is to put your Plex server (or whatever) on your NAS server since it is going to run 24x7. Install the relevant apps on your phones and tablets, install a streaming box at the important TVs in your house, and before you know it, your whole house's TV watching will be done through your server.

[Coopervid]

I have an Oppo clone M9702. The newer one M9201 can do the same. Plays DoVi from ISO, folders etc. It doesn't play DoVi form MKV but you can extract the m2ts file from MKV and it plays with DoVi from that. Mostly I use external HHD via USB but it also has network capabilities. Highly recommended!

[flojo]

... that additional variants of Amlogic's chips will be supported in the future ...

Probably not. The only reason it works now is that the kernel module is still being used from a old DV license. Dolby is for some reason restricting more and more of the devices which can decode the FEL layer.

I've never used Kodi, but it is a lot like Plex

It's not. Kodi is the farthest of all players from Plex/Jellyfin. Kodi is a superior player, but the 23 year old Windows Media Center interface is still present, which I'm not a fan of anymore. Kodi is C++/Python and mostly own source. Plex is a Web UI built upon ffmpeg. Both do complicated things in their own way, but they are very different when doing them.

I run the "Homatics Box R 4K Plus" to have both Android TV (Netflix, Hulu, etc.) and to play DV FEL. It cannot decode VC-1. When you boot directly into Coreelec, there is really no way to wake up the device if it goes to sleep unless you solder in a IR receiver (no big deal for me, but maybe others).

If people don't care about DV FEL support or playing back high bitrate 4K UHD (A.K.A. "Remux"), then I strongly feel that the 1st and 2nd generation Amazon 4K Firesticks are great and can be had very cheap used (~20usd for a supported device is hard to beat).

[Coopervid]

... that additional variants of Amlogic's chips will be supported in the future ...

Probably not. The only reason it works now is that the kernel module is still being used from a old DV license. Dolby is for some reason restricting more and more of the devices which can decode the FEL layer.

I've never used Kodi, but it is a lot like Plex

It's not. Kodi is the farthest of all players from Plex/Jellyfin. Kodi is a superior player, but the 23 year old Windows Media Center interface is still present, which I'm not a fan of anymore. Kodi is C++/Python and mostly own source. Plex is a Web UI built upon ffmpeg. Both do complicated things in their own way, but they are very different when doing them.

I run the "Homatics Box R 4K Plus" to have both Android TV (Netflix, Hulu, etc.) and to play DV FEL. It cannot decode VC-1. When you boot directly into Coreelec, there is really no way to wake up the device if it goes to sleep unless you solder in a IR receiver (no big deal for me, but maybe others).

If people don't care about DV FEL support or playing back high bitrate 4K UHD (A.K.A. "Remux"), then I strongly feel that the 1st and 2nd generation Amazon 4K Firesticks are great and can be had very cheap used (~20usd for a supported device is hard to beat).

Again. An Oppo clone works perfectly without fumbling and he is not a computer savvy person. Consider that.

[sidetracked]

Wow. Thank you all for your your posts. While I'm not all the way to fully 'getting it' I feel a LOT closer than I was.

I'll check out the Oppo clone (I'm an Oppo fan boy from way back, so I'm curious anyway).

It's funny, I worked in films and filmmaking my whole life, so the creation part is familiar to me. It's the modern tech for watching at home where I feel like I'm always running a number of years behind. And with a collection of +5,000 films on disc, many of which are long since out-of-print and no longer available, I've sort of stumbled through learning to back up everything (after some frustrating experiences with bronzed or otherwise unplayable discs some years back).

Generally, with the blu-rays,DVDs and now non-DV 4Ks. I just put .mkv back up copies on two different back up hard-drives. That way I'm covered if one drive suddenly dies (if that happens I create a new clone of the working one). I also keep the size of each drive to 5TB. That means I have a lot of little drives, but no one failure is as catastrophic. It also makes them easily transportable.

I really appreciate all your thoughts - so far and going forward. Nice to have a board not be TOO tough on an old guy muddling his way through...