n00b looking for tips/tricks/pointers

[projectfuhollywood]

hi everyone!

i am brand new to this forum and also brand new to anything rip, burn, transcode, etc. i came across makemkv at the recommendation of a friend and i am hoping it is going to do what i need it to with the help of handbrake and plex. my goal is to get all of my blu-rays, and some of my dvds, onto a nas storage system so i can access it from media players in my home such as a roku or appletv. i purchased a blu-ray drive today and pick it up this evening to start this process. so my questions are as follows:

1. once i download the MKV software, are there any settings that i should pay attention to right away? anything i should change?
2. when (if ) i figure out how to get the blu-ray into the MKV format, is it true that i should delete everything except the movie file itself?
3. once i have narrowed the "tracks" down to the files i want, is there anything else i need to do before leveraging handbrake? labeling etc.

any and all help is very much appreciated. i can build almost any automation, a/v distribution, or 2 piece projection system... but when it comes to this type of solution, i am completely out of my depth.

Thank you so much!
kc

[Woodstock]

First and foremost - treat ALL of this as PLAY. It's and adventure game, where the goal is to do something useful. And nothing is lost, really, if you have to do it over again. Children learn by trying different things, and refining things as they learn. We adult-age kids can still do that, if we want, once we ignore the idea that "doing it wrong is bad". You WILL fail at it, at some point, but that just means you found the edges of the world. Try something else next time.

(except skydiving. failing at that can be difficult to reset.)

First things, read the FAQ in my signature and turn on debug logging. It doesn't cost much in time or space, but will save time if you really have a problem, and need assistance.

Then go into Preferences, the General tab, and turn on "Expert mode". It will enable a lot of things that you will find useful, like the ability to change track names and even the file name that a track gets saved as.

Don't be afraid to RIGHT click with your mouse in various areas. There are useful things in the context menus.

You do NOT have to throw away everything but the main feature, but, you CAN. Rip everything, watch the extras, then ignore them, unless you REALLY want to keep them.

Working with handbrake, it is "usually" best to grab all tracks within a title, even though you can remove or change the selections. Then you have the most flexibility with handbrake's re-encode. There are exceptions - there are a couple of audio track types, particularly Atmos, which will cause problems with handbrake if you include them. Deselect those when ripping, until such time as the libraries used in handbrake can handle them.

As for using handbrake, ignore any tutorial you find online, especially if it was done with a version of HB older than 0.10.2, because it is probably WRONG. There is a lot of information available on the handbrake.fr website, and starting with the presets they include with the program will go a long way.