BBC Life series trouble

[tdtran1025]

I just bought the new BBC Life series on Bluray. I can't produce mkv files with picture. What seems to be the problem, anyone knows? The mkv files just have audio but no video.

[Tommye1078]

hey guys

I'm having the same problem. The file is ripped as "undf" and none of my players can play it. Any idea what this is all about.

[rachel]

I recently found the same thing with Wonders of the Solar System and the Doctor Who Bluray specials. It's actually not an MKV problem, but a problem with the available player applications not supporting the video codec used. They're using VC1-interlaced, which ffmpeg/libavcodec isn't yet supporting. It's somebody's Google Summer of Code 2010 project to add this support, after which hopefully MKVs ripped using MakeMKV from these disks can be used - applications like HandBrake, XBMC, mplayer et al will suddenly support be able to handle them.

It's my belief that you can rip them now using MakeMKV and just wait for the ability to play them back to come along later, if you need to give the disks back to whoever you borrowed them from. MakeMKV doesn't need to support the actual video codec; all it's doing is remuxing the data from one container to another, so I expect it's done so faithfully.

NB: In the process of trying to get this going myself I actually (gasp!) put the first Wonders disc into my PS3 and... wasn't exactly wowed by the quality in comparison to the off-air recording I'd made from BBC HD some months previously (which was in h.264). Makes me wonder if it's the best codec the BBC could be using for their recent bluray releases. (Older ones such as Planet Earth were in h.264 and look beautiful, of course.)

[Tommye1078]

thanks for the info

I'll go ahead and rip them now and wait until there support.

[geekgod]

Try the latest released VLC.. It works.

[tdtran1025]

which release? 1.1.0? Or newer?

[Tommye1078]

Try the latest released VLC.. It works.

Just tried using the latest VLC release and it does not play the blue ray rip of Life on Blu Ray.

[rachel]

Update:

Having read this (http://codecs.multimedia.cx/?p=295) from the developer on the ffmpeg project on the likelihood of seeing VC-1 interlaced support in the near future, I decided to try the Windows route.

I reinstalled (as I hadn't used it for years) my old Windows XP into VMWare Fusion on my iMac, got it all up to date, installed RipBot264... and it works. RipBot264 is using x264 for video encoding, in common with HandBrake, and with a bit of tweaking to make it do the same thing as the preset I use on HandBrake, it's been producing perfect results out of the Wonders of the Solar System bluray disc 1 I'd ripped using MakeMKV a month or two ago. I just have it doing passthru on the main audio track to a resulting MKV file.

So I was also right in saying you could go ahead and use makemkv to take copies of stuff ahead of when you're actually able to use them.

I did have to remember to give the windows vm 2 virtual cpu cores to get a decent speed out of it. Before then it was taking about 23 hours an episode; since then it's more like 8. More than twice as fast, which I found interesting.

Anyway, this is probably the solution that'll work for all those BBC blurays that we've otherwise been having problems with.