Hey all, I've been surfing the web and the forum but haven't turned anything up.
Is there any way to take a blu-ray rip mkv file (~25GB) and compress it down to a smaller size, say maybe 10gb? I'm looking for something simple hopefully
I use handbrake myself. There's lots of threads on their forums about encoding profiles, but the default "high-profile" preset will probably work fine for you. I also use mkvmerge to mux in audio/subtitles after the video is compressed.
I've always hated Handbrake, so i've always looked for alternatives.
So I'm currently using Ripbot.
RipBot264 is a simple and easy to use All-In-One Converter. Convert from DVD, Blu-ray or any video to iPod, iPad, PSP, PS3, XBOX360, PC, MAC, MP4, MKV, Blu-ray or AVCHD without exotic filters and unnecessary settings. Requires AVisynth, ffdshow, haali media splitter and .Net Framework.
You can also use BDRebuilder. You can either just do a complete backup using MakeMKV or save an .mkv title and use tsMuxer to produce a BluRay formatted folder. Might seem strange to go that way but "good" profile on BDRebuilder is very fast. That's what I use so it's worth it for me to do the muxing to gain the speed.
BDRebuilder can output .mkv but I prefer to let it output a compressed file structure and I just pull out the .m2ts file and rename it. My set top box prefers .m2ts to .mkv.
It's just an alternative. I'm pretty sure BDRB is much faster than HB. But once you go into the higher quality modes then my experience drops off.
I use handbrake and it works great , shrinks my blu ray mkv's from say 25gb down to 4gb with little quality loss. Be warned though the encode takes some time.
Why is that so unbelievable? Most blurays dont have detail that warrants 1080p (safely convert down to 720p), and the ones that do (pixar films mostly) are easily compressible. UP for example 1080p with dts audio compressed all the way down to 4.2gb using a recent x264 and --crf 18. Iorn man 2: 12gb, Avater 18gb, transformers 2: 11gb..
Sometimes I can see small differences in grain retention on my 50" tv from ~2ft away, but otherwise they look great.
So it is certainly possible! The studios just throw high bitrates around because they can.