I realize we're on the bleeding edge of making this work, and all the tools will likely need a few iterations to adjust to new features and technologies. For me, I have 2 primary purposes:
- backup disks before they go bad. These suckers are expensive! And they go bad just like regular dvds and blurays. I got this on the 2nd disk I tried:
Error 'Scsi error - MEDIUM ERROR:L-EC UNCORRECTABLE ERROR' occurred while reading '/BDMV/STREAM/00015.m2ts' at offset '31950237696' - access them on my home theater system with Plex so I don't have to change disks. I want it all - hdr10/dolby vision, 4k resolution, and dolby atmos/dts-x sound.
- For my asus 16x drive, it takes ~1 hour 20 min to backup a disk. San Andreas is 60GB.
- On some disks, the "top layer" read goes quickly, but at half way, it drops to 2x to read the lower layers, and this takes most of the time.
- Of course, once I saw this with 2 4k disks, the 3rd one was different. Labyritnth is 6x across the last part for a 37 minute read. Perhaps the disk is different or compressed onto 1 layer?
- If I ask makemkv to create a .mkv file from the backup, that's about 45GB compared to ~5GB for handbrake on a 2K movie. I haven't tried handbrake yet on a .mkv file, but have heard there were plenty of issues involved. Once they are resolved, it's likely to have a much smaller size. (good for backup storage!)
- The makemkv backup folder doesn't seem to call out hdr10 or dolby vision vs. non-hdr. I don't know if it's even possible. Downstream quality is a bit washed out, I think some of my tools don't know how to handle hdr, this should resolve itself.
- The makemkv back folder (when viewed by makemkv to create a .mkv file) also doesn't show the dolby atmos audio track. Darn! I see 7.1, 5.1, etc. Does anyone know if the data is captured and that future versions of makemkv will be able to distinguish it? Or will I need to rerun my backup folders? If the later, I'll probably hold off for a bit other than run a few experiments.
- Trying to view a .mkv file via plex or vlc on the same pc that might be transcoding it is poor - it stutters quite a bit. If/when we can get the metadata right on these things so that no transcoding is needed, hopefully it will speed up. This is on the 4 core/8 thread 4ghz i7.6xxx generation processor. Has anyone found this faster on a 6 core or threadripper?
- Plex transcoding the 4k file to 2k on my tablet works very smoothly.
- Plex playing the 4k mkv file on my roku to the big tv works ok. It claims it's a 4k file, but after playing it, I see it's playing 2k. In options I can switch the stream to 4k and verified on my receiver it's 4k. yay! Audio says 7.1, so I didn't get the dolby atmos track somehow. (darn, but not surprising) I noticed 1 stutter in ~10 minutes of play. One time I tried it, roku said it could not play this file. BUT despite all this, I thought it looked and sounded good. Later on I'll try the TV info screen and see if it somehow is getting hdr ok.