Compressing Blu-ray video files?

[Goldengoose7]

I've been successfully using MakeMKV to copy movie and TV show files off of various Blu-ray discs which of course are being saved as .mkv files by MakeMKV. I was wondering if there is an application or a feature within MakeMKV that can reduce the file size of these very large files in order to get more of them on my external hard drives without compromising the video quality.

I assume based on a few Bittorrent files I have downloaded that this is possible to do on the OSX OS, but I am not clear as to what software is being used to produce these smaller file sizes. I know that MakeMKV itself seems to be reducing the files sizes to some degree through the use of the MKV spec itself, but is there more that can be done?

Just want to be clear on what my options are before I transfer many more Blu-ray files off the BD discs and onto my Mac Mini and its array of external FW800 HDs.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions, links and software recommendations.

Cheers.

[]Rick.

[Icanseestars]

MakeMKV does not touch the video, it jut extracts original stream to .mkv container. What you want is an x264 encoder like Handbrake.

* Feed it the .mkv file via source->file
* use the High Profile preset
* select mkv as container
* go to the audio tab and make AC3 passthru or DTS passthru the primary track depending on what have in the original mkv file
* click start

This will take a very long time unless you have a fast CPU with multiple cores. My advice is buy a bigger 3TB HDD, cheaper and no need to waste time encoding everything.

[Romansh]

Note that if using HandBrake you want to make sure to have a separate track for the AC3 or DTS core and select that as the source audio track in HandBrake, as it can't extract the core of an HD audio track from an MKV file (it can and will extract the core automatically if the container is MPEG-TS, however).

[Goldengoose7]

Thanks for the tips guys! I appreciate it. I wasn't aware of those specifics about the audio tracks! Can you give me an idea of how much of a reduction in file size I can expect to see if I use HandBrake with the settings you specified as opposed to a straight across transfer using MakeMKV? Trying to get an idea of whether or not it is worth further fiddling with an issue I have run into with HB...

I was using HandBrake to do my encoding until I discovered MakeMKV. I recently discovered Plex and started using that instead of VLC to play my media files. Problem is... Anything I had previously encoded and continue to encode with HandBrake crashes Plex the minute I click play on the file. VLC plays these just fine, so it is obviously a bug in Plex, but Plex, with its wonderful media server, menus and overall organizational capabilities is hands down what I prefer to use as my player now. The same video transferred using MakeMKV plays fine in Plex. Have still not been able to determine why this is happening, and so far the devs over on the Plex site have not been able to help resolve the issue. For now, the solution is to avoid using HandBrake and stick with MakeMKV exclusively as my encoder for files intended to be played using Plex's media player.

Currently file storage is not really a problem since I have over 6 TB of free space out of a total of 9TB reserved for my media collection on our network. About 70% of that storage is connected via FW800 directly to the Mac Mini that runs Plex and our media server. The reason I was asking about compression options is that I can see my 6TB of free space quickly disappearing if I start adding a lot of 1:1 Blu-ray movie and TV shows to my computer archives. I burned through nearly 2TB over the last two days as I started adding some of my Blu-ray collection to the system. Prior to that, I had been focusing on only adding standard DVDs, which of course take up far less space and 9TB seemed like all the storage I would ever need. With Blu-ray added to that mix, I can see running out of space rather quickly if I attempt to put everything we have on disc onto our network.

If HandBrake is my only option, then I guess I will just keep using MakeMKV for now and perhaps look into buying more HDDs when I run out of space.

Thanks again guys!

[Icanseestars]

Try using XBMC or Boxee to play the media as both have OSX versions (Plex itself is a fork of XBMC).

If you have access to Windows there are plenty of other x264 encoders like Staxrip or Ripbot264 that you could use instead of handbrake.

[Romansh]

Does your mac have a 9400M, 320M or GT330M graphics card, and is hardware-accelerated decoding enabled in Plex? What settings did you use in HandBrake?