www.makemkv.com

All of the Blu Rays I am ripping with MakeMKV on my Mac (Quad Core MacPro, 10GB RAM, SSD harddrive) are coming out VERY "grainy". That is the picture is quite fuzzy and there seems to be seem audio sync issues.

No, this Blu Rays are NOT meant to be fuzzy, there are nature documentaries such as Planet Earth. When viewed on a standard Blu Ray player they are 1080p worth of HD gorgeousness. When ripped they look like VHS copy of a copy.

VLC also reports errors when trying to play this MKVs but plays them regardless. When I compress them with Handbrake nothing will play them. It seems like there is some sort of copy protection or encryption getting in the way.

When I rip a DVD with the exact same HW and SW everything is fine, picture clear DVD quality, no playback issues of any kind.

I see lots of complaints of "grainy" Blu Ray rips on various forums and the answer is always:
"that particular Blu Ray was meant to look grainy" - which is not the case for a film like "Plant Earth", or
"there must be an issue with that particular Blu Ray disc" - which is also not the case because I get the exact same behavior on a dozen plus different Blu Ray disks; or
"you must have under powered hardware" - which is also not the case, I am running some of the fastest HW money can buy

Any thoughts?

this doesn't make a lot of sense, as MakeMKV isn't really converting anything per se, rather it's just taking the BD audio and video streams and repackaging them in an MKV container. All main feature audio and video is supposed to be retained in its entirety, at the exact same quality. I've used MakeMKV to rip probably 50 or so BD discs and I've never noticed any graininess during playback. Could it be a problem with the media player you are using to play the file? Are you playing it directly on your Mac, or are you using a dedicated media player to test the file quality? I know my PC has trouble playing back super high definition files (bitrates in excess of 20MBit/s) without stutter or lag. However when I play the same files on my primary entertainment system using my digital media player, there are no issues

I have watched hundreds of movies ripped at 720p and 1040p on this Mac with no stutter and with perfect clarity using MKVs that have been ripped by someone else. In fact this is my primary method for watching movies and TV shows, ripped HD MKVs on my Mac hooked up to 42" LCD TV and it works like a dream. Except when I try to rip the Blu Ray myself.

When I rip a Blu Ray there is no stutter pe se, there are actually pixelated artifacts filling the image that I refer to as graininess. This phenomenon occurs equally with every media player I use: VLC, QuickTime, iTunes, Miro, MPlayerX, it doesn't matter. If I put the exact same Blu Ray disc in my dedicated Blu Ray player that is connected via HDMI to the exact same TV the picture quality is perfect. With something like Planet Earth the difference between the two is black and white.

My next step is to try to rip Blu Rays with something like DVDFab for Mac. If the issue doesn't occur then it is likely an issue with MakeMKV for Mac. I suspect this is in fact an issue with MakeMKV for Mac as I have found references in several other forums to this exact behavior for MakeMKV for Mac, which always get written off as "it's supposed to look grainy".

If DVDFab solves the problem I will post and link to screen captures of the video output from MKVs from both tools to show the difference.

wormtown wrote:If DVDFab solves the problem I will post and link to screen captures of the video output from MKVs from both tools to show the difference.

I'd be interested to see this.

Make sure you use the remuxing option, so it doesn't change anything about the video. if you re-encode it your test will be invalid.

Planet Earth documentaries, as in the BBC Planet Earth series?

If yes, then it's interlaced VC-1, and you would have to use something that supports that proprietary codec. If you check your Handbrake logs, I'm betting you will see that they mention support for interlaced VC-1 is not there. If you are using OS X 10.8 you might not have a good option since QT(using the Flip4Mac WMV codecs) doesn't open matroska files without Perian, and Perian is not supported any more. That's the only way I've seen suggested for OS X, but I'm not sure if that user ever reported back.

If no, then please post a Handbrake scan log.

SC

wormtown wrote:I suspect this is in fact an issue with MakeMKV for Mac as I have found references in several other forums to this exact behavior for MakeMKV for Mac, which always get written off as "it's supposed to look grainy".

I have ripped hundreds of movies on my Mac using MakeMKV -- and they all look identical to the source Blu-rays. It really can't work any other way, because MakeMKV is not changing the video data; it simply decrypts it and stores it in an MKV container.

Dave