www.makemkv.com

I've been testing makemkv on my DVD collection, and replaying (on XBMC on an AppleTV2) and it all looks good. I rip the DTS or Dolby sound-track and English subtitles. I'm averaging ~6G per movie. I was wondering if there is any useful post-processing that can be done on the MKV file to reduce the size further without loss of fidelity?

Any similar recommendations for Blu-Ray rips?

Thanx.

E.

Mathematically, no. But it's possible to re-encode to a smaller file with a quality loss small enough as to be imperceptible.

HandBrake can take your MKV and output an MKV, passing the audio and subtitles through while re-encoding the video to H.264 (will take a while though).

Things are a bit more complicated for Blu-Ray when it comes to audio or subtitle pass-through.

Romansh wrote:Mathematically, no. But it's possible to re-encode to a smaller file with a quality loss small enough as to be imperceptible.

HandBrake can take your MKV and output an MKV, passing the audio and subtitles through while re-encoding the video to H.264 (will take a while though).

Things are a bit more complicated for Blu-Ray when it comes to audio or subtitle pass-through.

The efficiencies of H.264 encoding versus MPEG2 encoding used on DVDs can net no perceptible loss in quality while accomplishing a great deal of file size savings. At a quality factor of about 17 (q=17.0 on the HandBrakeCLI commandline) and using the other High Profile preset values, even a videophile would be hard-pressed to tell the difference in video quality.

If you choose to copy the ac3 or dts audio track (without transcoding it), you can still get all the sound quality of the original, an extremely close approximation of the video quality of the original and still come in between 1.8 and 2.5 GB.

I am ripping my dvds now with makeMKV and I hope to make them streamable from my readynas duo via wifi to some kind of mediaplayer. Will post processing make any difference in this perspective? Maybe someone has an optimised way for wifi streming?

Thank you.

OK. I was thinking on the WD TV Live, as it is quite cheap and seems to have wide format support. But I guess I should keep all of my .mkv files as back up and recode as I need it. Is there a windows program with a proper gui that can batch recode mkv files?

Thanks again.

svenni84 wrote:OK. I was thinking on the WD TV Live, as it is quite cheap and seems to have wide format support.

I have a WD TV Live and it's been excellent so far. Every single disc I've ripped with MakeMKV has been played back perfectly.

I also hear good things about the Xtreamer line of products.

Staxrip can batch process files and convert into x264, there is also Cyko a front end for Handbrake which also includes batch encoding.

Personally I'd give Xtreamer a wide berth, they are just a Realtek chipset licensee like AC Ryan and a dozen others but Xtreamer have a bad rep when it comes to customer relations, some shady marketing and they have a closed forum not viewable to guests & the slightest bit of criticism gets you banned. There are plenty of other media players out there that use the same hardware Xtreamer use without that baggage.

Woodstock wrote:Not particularly fast, especially when converting 1080 Bluray rips to MP4

Handbrake, along with EVERY other free (and ripoff payware) uses ffmpeg/x264. If its not fast enough, try a faster preset

An alternative could be apple tv 2 with xbmc. Any thought on that one compared to wdtv live? Again, I plan to stream via wifi (720p max). Dunno if either of them are better at that then the other?

I'll check out handbrake.

Thanks a lot.

Woodstock wrote:

skittle wrote:Handbrake, along with EVERY other free (and ripoff payware) uses ffmpeg/x264. If its not fast enough, try a faster preset

But, the faster presets are also lower resolution...

Handbrake will scream through a BD rip if I select rip-to-iphone. But, that just doesn't look very good when blown up to 42" or more...

He meant a faster x264 preset: https://forum.handbrake.fr/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=19426

Woodstock wrote:I just wish it understood PGS/SUB subtitles. I've downloaded the latest nightly build to see if they've added that, but it isn't mentioned in any of the check-in notes since 0.9.5 came out.

PGS subtitle support (as well as HD audio passthrough to MKV) is planned. But the developer who can implement these features is busy and doesn't have time to work on them right now.