Informations and questions

[Lolo06]

Hello,

I allow myself to ask you because I was advised Makemkv to properly dematerialize my film collection.
I own several hundred BRs, and UHD BRs and as part of an upcoming move, I want to reduce the space dedicated to this passion.
However, I do not know anything about it and I therefore ask you.
Is it easy? what material do you need? Is a Dell Inspiron 7000 sufficient?
Is the quality equivalent to the physical medium?
There you go, I know it's been a lot but I don't know anything in this area ...
Thanks to those who will take the time

[Woodstock]

If you want to reduce the size, you a tool like handbrake or an equivalent encoding too. Handbrake can handle DVD and BD video well, and you can set the compression level to suit your preferences.

Where things fall apart is with this is the High Dynamic Range and Dolby Vision of UHDs. Handbrake doesn't do HDR or DV yet.

[Lolo06]

Hi,
Thank you for this answer.
What is the difference between Makemkv and handbrake?
What material do i need ? Is my Oppo player plugged on the computer will function ?

[st4evr]

And Google is your friend. Use it for these kind of basic questions. There you can find hundreds of guides with just a quick and simple search. Example:

https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+ ... e&ie=UTF-8

There are thousands of existing helpful sources out there at your fingertips. Just have to be willing to search and read or watch through some how-to videos.

[dcoke22]

The discussion about transcoding rips into smaller files is long and full of nuance. MakeMKV is the first step in that chain, as it lets you take the bits on a DVD, Blu-ray, or UHD and put them, unchanged, into a MKV container. As a rough estimation, figure a DVD is 5GB, a Blu-ray is about 30GB, and a 4K UHD is about 60GB.

So, you need storage space, lots of it. And, if you're going to getting rid of your physical copies, you need a backup.

Also, you'll need an optical drive. viewtopic.php?f=16&t=19634 is a good place to start. If you don't want to lose your mind worrying about firmware and flashing, find one of the sellers referenced there and buy a drive from them. If you want to rip faster, use two or three drives. MakeMKV will gladly rip multiple discs as once.

Once the bits leave the disc and end up on a hard drive, your playback setup needs to change. This is where people use something like Plex. All these MKV files (transcoded or not) get loaded into a Plex server (or Kodi, or Infuse, or whatever), which then serves that out over your local network to a client, either built into a TV, or some dongle plugged into a HDMI port, or an iPad, or a laptop, etc.

If you go down this route, I recommend not worrying about transcoding now. Just get the bits off the discs and into MKV files. Storage is relatively cheap and you can always choose to transcode later.

[Woodstock]

Handbrake and MakeMKV serve related, but different, functions.

MakeMKV extracts video files from optical disks as its primary function.

Handbrake is a video encoder, that can use the output from MakeMKV to encode files for specific purposes.

[st4evr]

Once the bits leave the disc and end up on a hard drive, your playback setup needs to change. This is where people use something like Plex. All these MKV files (transcoded or not) get loaded into a Plex server (or Kodi, or Infuse, or whatever), which then serves that out over your local network to a client, either built into a TV, or some dongle plugged into a HDMI port, or an iPad, or a laptop, etc.

Not necessarily as the OPPO can handle playback of video MKV container files and BD full folder structure backups just fine if you connect an HDD with the files to its available USB port(s) for example, or even through a network if it’s all setup correctly from end to end (e.g stream the MKV file/folder backups from a NAS directly to the OPPO connected to the network). But that is a conversation for and that has happened in a thousand other forums.

Btw OP, what OPPO is it that you have? 93/95, 103/105, 203/205?

Anyways, some of these topics are long and winded as dcoke22 so accurately also noted, and in some cases not necessarily within the subject matter for this forum (e.g. Handbrake support as they have their own development team/owners and support forum and zero relation to MakeMKV).

But first things first, the OP should start playing around with MakeMKV and Handbreak to get a feeling for things and see if it fits their workflow and understanding. It will not explode if they just try it. The worst thing that can happen is somehow they get a non-working file at first. Delete it and try again.

If you have an existing standard BD drive I would not recommend going down the rabbit whole for new drives and firmware, Kodi, Plex, etc, just yet when you haven't even begun reading/researching/learning MakeMKV or even Handbreak. Try a standard BD (non-UHD/4K) first on what you have and see if it works as a pure test and learning experience. If you don’t have a compatible BD drive at all to begin with, then yeah, the link dcoke22 provided is a good starting point.

So, first focus on the first step. Learn and play with MakeMKV and see if its output works for you on what you already have. Plenty of guides in the link I provided above. Then the next step could be trying out Handbreak if you feel re-encoding to be necessary. And so on. One step at a time.