Bill Bailey: Dandelion Mind

[Apple Aardvark]

I picked up this blu ray disc from Amazon UK (region B, in other words). MakeMKV beta rips it fine, creates four MKV files. Only one of them plays back with video, and it's pretty obviously a background clip for the menus. The others play back with sound only.

Running it through VLC spits out error messages, and Handbrake says it can't find a valid picture (or words to that effect - sorry, I don't have the full text of the message in front of me.)

It's not, to the best of my knowledge, a BD+ issue; forcing a BD+ dump produces nothing.

Thoughts? Suggestions? I'm more than happy to provide any additional relevant information; it's simply that there's nothing in the FAQ that seems to cover this situation, so I don't know what information is needed.

Edit: for what it's worth, the video appears to be in VC1. I doubt that's particularly relevant or useful, though.

Thanks.

[Romansh]

More specifically, the video is encoded in VC-1 with interlaced compression. FFmpeg's VC-1 decoder (used by VLC and HandBrake, among others) doesn't support interlaced VC-1.

[Apple Aardvark]

Ah. That would do it - thanks. Time to go a-googlin' for methods of transcoding, and from what little I've seen so far, it Ain't Gonna Be Pretty.

I appreciate the quick reply.

[setarip_old]

@romansh

Do you have this actual Blu-ray disc?

I ask because the following website indicates that the Region B version is 1080p:

http://www.blurayspecs.co.uk/blu-ray-fi ... on-mind-uk

Technical SpecsTitle:
Bill Bailey: Dandelion Mind

Original Title:
Bill Bailey: Dandelion Mind

Country of origin: UK
Regions: B
Release date: 22.11.2010
Production year: 2010
Runtime:
Genre: Comedy
Video Resolution: 1080p
Video Aspect: 1.78:1
Sound:
DTS-HD MA 5.1:

[Romansh]

Do you have this actual Blu-ray disc?

I ask because the following website indicates that the Region B version is 1080p:

http://www.blurayspecs.co.uk/blu-ray-fi ... on-mind-uk

No, I don't. It's just the symptoms are all too familiar.

Interesting that the website says it's 1080p. It could be wrong though. The HandBrake activity log would tell us whether it's interlaced or not, and if not, might give an explanation as to why it doesn't consider it a valid source.

[RichB93]

I can confirm that the main feature on this disc is indeed 1080i (As confirmed by my monitor which reports a 60i source). Very strange though because as you mention the box clearly states the main feature is 1080p...

[Apple Aardvark]

Just a quick update, for the sake of any others who go googling for answers.

Ripbot264, although ridiculously slow (two frames per second on a quad core, 2.8 GHz Xeon system - albeit in a VMware virtual host rather than on the raw hardware), succeeded in transcoding the file from interlaced VC-1 to H.264. Painful, but considering that it can be run in the background/overnight/over the course of several weeks, and only needs to be done once, it's an acceptable solution.