WD HDTV and MKV files reducing

[bvannier]

Sorry for my poor English ...
So far I am quite happy with the last version. Some minor problems but for a beta release, quite good.
I use AnyDVD HD and MakeMKV to transcode my blueray disk, then I can see my film with WD HDTV. Of course I don't see the subtitles, but not that bad !
Can somebody explain to me which other program he uses to reduce the size of the mkv file, keeping, of course all the audio-tracks and subtitles...
Your help, or experience would be greatly appreciated
So far it's sunny in Paris, France
Kindly yours
Bruno

[Bling2Ming]

I mostly use HandBrake. it's available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

I would use the development snapshot from here

http://forum.handbrake.fr/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=12009

As there's a known issue with the Matroska muxer in the 0.9.3 release that causes it to stall if there are bad timestamps in the input

I use Makemkv first then feed the created mkv file into HandBrake it works really well for me.

I just use the High Profile Preset and change the container from mp4 to mkv. I'ts slow but the x264 encoder makes quality files.

However I'm afraid HandBrake will not handle subs from MKV at this time .

[webvan]

Any way around this ?

Been trying to backup my old DVDs to mkv in x264 format and it seems there is no software that does that at this time. I would like to preserve at least one language and one subtitle. Another thread mentioned ripbot but it's rather complex, giving me 4 subtitle files to pick from for instance and I have no idea which one to choose from, preview doesn't seem to work.

Not sure about BD ripping since I haven't done that and I might be missing something but for a DVD you might as well use the ISO format, right ?

[NomadCF]

This is all every simple to do, and on top of that it really really doesn't matter weather or not your favorite converter/reencoder can handle multiple audio and or subtitle tracks. As you should never be passing any of these things to the video compressor.

So heres what u can need

• tsmuxer
  Some video converter (my personal choice is XVID4PSP)

Steps

• 1. Open the mkv file in tsmuxergui
  2. uncheck all the audio and subtitles, change nothing else
  3. click "start muxing". this will create a new file using the old files name and loction (path), but with a _new at the end of the title.
  4. New using that NEW load it into any converter/reencoder/etc program you and let it convert to what ever you'd like.
  5. Once thats done, you need to reopen tsmuxergui and DRAG into it that newly converted/reencoded file
  6. Now DRAG into that open tsmuxergui window the ORIGINAL movie file.
  7. uncheck ONLY the original video track. (If you've done it like I've written it should be the second check box)
  8. click "start remux"
  9. You now have a file with compressed video and all the subtitles,audio,etc you want.

As a side note this can be done in batchs, as tsmuxer can be command line driven and there is a version of xvid4psp that loads in full directories/folders.

[webvan]

Nice workflow, thanks, in the meantime I had used mkvmerge to remux and it did the trick too.

Actually with handbrake 1/2/3 can be skipped as it reads the mkv, and you can uncheck the audio.

XVID4PSP looks like a nice tool (which x264 profile do you use ? Trying Q21 right now) and batch encoding is certainly something Handbrake could use, movies2iphone has it but offers zero control on the output and I found it produced larger x264 files than Handbrake without any visible improvement in quality.

Remaining items on my wishlist :
- find an app that shows the file sizes of the various components without having to demux
- an easy tool to reencode multiple audio streams and keep the DD5.1 format, on my backup, video is 700Mb, and the two audio tracks are 350Mb each, a bit much.

Any hints ?

[NomadCF]

Nice workflow, thanks, in the meantime I had used mkvmerge to remux and it did the trick too.

I use tsmuxer to convert from a MKV to TS to avoid, well really to remove the issues with MKV playbacks on some players. The WDTV being one of them some times.

Also it's script-able so I can do whole sets of files at once, example I converted my complete Dreasdian and Firefly series from mkv to TS. Then with only the video track. Then Ran those though xvid4psp And then using a second script, remuxed muxed the new encoded file with the audio only from the org MKV into a new TS. So the end results was a TS with x264 video and 2 audio tracks.

Or you can just script it to demux the everything into there own files, for editing. I did this combine my 6 DVD set of LOTRs extended cut into 3 movies. The complete demuxing was needed to because the AC3 audio tracks needed to be altered. So that when TS (DVD) 2 was joined to TS (DVD) 1. All the audio stayed inline. And all this was due to the fact that who ever 1st mastered the LOTR DVDs setup a delay on every audio track on ever 1st DVD. A great masted audio track should have 0 DELAY. As a delay just means poor/lazyness on part of the "audio master".

Actually with handbrake 1/2/3 can be skipped as it reads the mkv, and you can uncheck the audio.

True but I've had handbrake (from time to time (aka blue moon)) "speed" up the video when encoding. When either of the fallowing are true, It can see the audio track and or it file was in a MKV. Again this was not always, But it was enough for me to stop trying it

XVID4PSP looks like a nice tool (which x264 profile do you use ? Trying Q21 right now) and batch encoding is certainly something Handbrake could use, movies2iphone has it but offers zero control on the output and I found it produced larger x264 files than Handbrake without any visible improvement in quality.

Q21 Extreme

Remaining items on my wishlist :
- find an app that shows the file sizes of the various components without having to demux
- an easy tool to reencode multiple audio streams and keep the DD5.1 format, on my backup, video is 700Mb, and the two audio tracks are 350Mb each, a bit much.

Any hints ?

1. for file info : http://mediainfo.sourceforge.net/en
2. I would avoid this, as AC3 & DTS are already compressed versions of there former selfs. So the only way to recompress s to uncompress then recompress. And well the out come can be pretty bad. I would tell you to try reencoding a MP3 (aka MP3 => WAV => MP3 all the while not changing any settings on the MP3 compression level in between).

exmaple:

• 1. CD => WAV
  2. WAV => mp3 (320 kbps)
  3. MP3 => WAV
  4. WAV => mp3 (320 kbps)

2. Side note: Some boards/people will tell you that you can could recode your DTS/AC3 to FLAC. And it might be smaller, but thats false. AC3 is already a compressed lossy format. So going to a FLAC file is only usefull is your talking about a uncompressed audio track. Then you'll it would be best to go from this LPCM (uncompressed audio track) to a FLAC. As the FLAC will be smaller (compressed) yet lossless.

[webvan]

Excellent stuff, thanks ! Yes reencoding lossy files is not a good idea (reminds me of the good old days of the heated discussions on the mp3.com and vqf.com forums...it's just that having an audio file that weighs 50% of the video file is a bit "annoying", will probably just keep one language and the subs.

Need to look into the ts sripting a bit more, might need a new version of tsmuxer because it complains it can't read some of the info in an mkv of a DVD created by makemkv, no line for the subs for instance, still seems to work ok though for demuxing, not sure about conversion to ts, will try. UPDATE - nope, not subtitles in the muxed .ts, must be doing something wrong.

I did some testing of xvid4ps and comparisons with handbrake using the 720p files of Panasonic TZ7 that I usually reencode to iPod resolution for uploading to vimeo, and when blown up it's clearly superior for the same file size (better colors, less blocking) when I reduce the quality to Q/25 (default is 21 for the iPhone setting)

Mediainfo is great although I wasn't able to add the steam size in the "custome" display screen for a more compact view.

Just started en encode using Q21 Extreme, that's a demanding setting, only getting around 16fps on my Quadcore Q8200/2.33mhz but it's not maxed out (only 80%), might try Q21 ultra later.

I use a PS3 to view videos on my LCD so I was going to create an AVCHD to keep the subtitles but I'm pretty sure the PS3 reads .ts files so I might try that.

[NomadCF]

In XVID4PSP

Same Quality:
Turbo = Ultra = Extreme

But File Size wise:
Turbo = Biggest, aka almost no compression
Ultra = Middle the road compression
Extreme = Smallest file size, longest time to do

[webvan]

Indeed, mine is now finished and its 593Mb, smaller than my 900kbps Handbrake, will now check the quality.

Any thoughts on the error message in tsmuxergui ? Am I trying to do something it can't do, i.e. open an mkv with subtitles and remux it to .ts ?

[lizzyjakers]

There are some softwares that let you make your media files lesser quality and this could lessen the capacity of the file. You just need to consider that NDTV could not be so good if the video is in lower quality. Check this out yourself so you will see the differences.

[MilesAhead]

Lately I've been trying out a software that's been around a couple of years.
Quick AVI Creator. It's a freeware:
http://www.videohelp.com/tools/Quick_AVI_Creator

It has both encode with xvid 2 pass and encode with x264 3 modes to choose from.

Also it's simple enough to edit the xvid.presets to add an xvid "One Pass Mode"

I've done a few conversions using xvid both downsized to standard DVD and with HD output.
The results look good even with my "one pass mode."

The last couple of runs I've been trying out compressing .mkv.
I've only done a couple of runs. One is going on right now. But
I'm optimistic it will turn out to be a viable alternative to Handbrake.

It uses AvsP so you can tweak your filters.. and it does the basic stuff for you like
setting the correct color space etc..



edit: I did successfully compress a 90 minute film using this app.. took 10 hours on my dual core for
x264 one pass. I noticed the audio just slightly out of sync but that may be due to telling it to
use the audio track as is... could be fixed easily enough by adjusting audio delay I'm sure.

From my trials so far, the most bang per buck with this app seems to be converting to
.avi HD using xvid encoder with one pass mode. The runs I've done using 3200 kbit
for bit rate have come out quite good. A full length film ends up being a bit under
3 GB and looks great on WD set top box. If you want to output SD .avi just add
a line to the .avs script to size down to 720,480. Very nice hidden gem!

[MilesAhead]

Just used Simple AVI Creator to convert to HD .avi with burned in subs. I just left the idx/sub subtitles I got from BDSup2Sub at 1080P resolution and burned them into the video using VobSub() function in .avs script. The subs look great.