Blu-ray : saved file is huge

[Lucied]

Hello,
Following the purchase of a film on blu-ray disc I installed MakeMKV on my computer (Xubuntu 20.04) following the instructions given. Direct disc playback with vlc works fine. The backup on the hard disk too, but it produces an enormous file: 40 gigabytes for a duration of approximately 2 hours!
Is there any way to reduce the size of the saved file without lowering the video and audio quality?
Thanks in advance for any suggestions on this.

[Woodstock]

That is quite normal for BD data. UHD is even worse.

Your request: Make it smaller.
Your limitations: Do not reduce video or audio quality.

Methods that meet that criteria: None. All methods available that reduce the size further will result in some loss of quality.

Methods that can come close enough for most people are available. You can use tools like handbrake to reduce the size with minimal reduction in quality.

For me, a typical BD source ends up being 50-70% of the original size for live-action movies with lots of detail and motion, or only 10% of original for typical animation. My tolerance for encoding artifacts varies with how interesting the video is; if I'm looking for artifacts, it's because the video is so uninterested my mind is looking for something else to do. And if the artifacts are bad enough to interfere with watching interesting stuff, I'll re-run the handbrake encode with different parameters to make them go away.

[SixDigitCode]

In my experience (for live-action movies at least) is that a quality of 20 in Handbrake generally reduces filesizes down to 10GB or so (around 10mbps) without a loss of quality that's too noticeable. If you pause the video and get your face up next to the TV you can definitely see the chunky edges, but when I'm sitting a reasonable distance away while the movie is playing it is very hard to find any compression artifacts. There is some color banding in dark scenes but it shows up in the original blu-ray as well.

I second the recommendation for Handbrake. It encodes by quality instead of bitrate, so the bitrate goes up in more intensive scenes (confetti, flocks of birds, dark scenes, etc) and goes down in less intensive scenes (static images, flat 2D animation, single character on an unmoving background, etc). Instead of trying to crunch each frame into a specified bitrate, Handbrake dynamically adjusts the bitrate depending on how "compressible" a given section is, which will keep the movie a lot more consistent than plugging the movie into a video editor and exporting it with a certain bitrate.

[gnj1958]

But is there a way of doing it quicker? I am ripping my first movie. It took about 25 mins on MakeMKV to rip from the blu ray. However reducing it to a more manageable file size in Handrake is taking forever. It's been going for 3 hours and it's only halfway there. I have over 1000 movies to rip. At this rate it's going to take years.

[Woodstock]

You can chose different parameters for the encoding to speed it up, or get smaller sizes, or higher quality. Pick 2, because the third will become unobtainable. There is also hardware encoding with QSV (assuming you have Intel hardware) or the AMD or nVidia equivalents, assuming you are tolerant of lower quality and somewhat bigger output files. QSV can SMOKE through a BD rip at 200-300 frames per second.

There are other things you can do if you chose software encoding. If you are encoding a bluray source, you should make sure you have deinterlacing turned off. That will make the encode about 5% faster, and BD sources typically aren't interlaced. Filter choices affect encode speed.

Handbrake defaults to doing slower, higher-quality encodes. You can pick a faster encoder setting, raise the "Constant Quality" setting to, say, RF=22 instead of RF=20, things like that.

Best recommendation I can give you, though, is to learn how to use the handbrake command line - you can rip enough MKV files in short order to queue handbrake to run for DAYS, with no intervention on your part. I do it via batch files on Windows, so I can edit the batch file while it is running to add additional files.

[gnj1958]

Thanks for the help. What video codec should I be using? also the "optimize video" settings. Should I leave them where they are?

The choice whether to go for quality over file size is a big one. I'm hoping to end up with a 10gig +/- file size. I have just over 1000 movies and even at 10G that's going to need a lot of storage space.

[Woodstock]

For sources less than 4K UHD, using x264 vs x265 comes down to compatibility (favors x264), speed of encoding (favors x264), absolute minimum size (favors x265).

I don't bother with x265 in my usage, because I only have a couple of devices that can play the files reasonably well.

As for size... I have 70TB on my main server. It's half full, with 30,000+ anime files, about a thousand movies, and 5,000+ TV shows. Once you commit to making things easily accessible, the expenditure becomes as easy as using a credit card...

[dcoke22]

As for size... I have 70TB on my main server. It's half full, with 30,000+ anime files, about a thousand movies, and 5,000+ TV shows. Once you commit to making things easily accessible, the expenditure becomes as easy as using a credit card...

Do you keep your rips Woodstock?

I keep my rips. Getting the bits off the optical disc and into a .mkv file is the slow and tedious part. The encoding, while it sometimes take a while, doesn't require much input from me. The tools I use for encoding and how I go about it have evolved over time. I've always been glad I didn't have to go back and rerip very much since I decided to keep my rips fairly early in my journey.

I would recommend, gnj1958, starting with x264 hardware encoding if you can. x264 encoding is fast and playback is well supported. Most people have some way to do hardware based encoding too if their computer is reasonably new. For instance, the Intel Quick Sync Video hardware encoding on my computer from 2017 can crank through a 2 hour, 30-ish GB blu-ray movie rip in about 20 minutes. The file sizes are between 5 GB - 10 GB and the movies look reasonably good to my eye.

I think you'll have to rip and process a couple dozen movies and see how they work for you and make adjustments from there. If you have kept your rips, re-encoding becomes relatively easy.

[Woodstock]

No, I do not generally keep the raw rip for more than a month. That's enough time to figure out if I screwed up on the encoding, like I apparently have on To Love-Ru (the Blurays are interlaced and telecined, and I didn't tell handbrake to remove it because, well, BDs aren't interlaced or telecined).

I also have (near) zero interest in "Extras", so they aren't kept.