Rippig BD > DVD

[T i m]

Hi all,

I bought a BD the other day and I fancied also having it in DVD form.

I've got it to a file that will play fine in VLC except the audio track is for the sight impaired and I can't see a way of choosing anything different to play in VLC or how to add / remove / select anything different in the toolchain.

So, those of you who rip their stuff to digital storage, how you typically do so (toolchain / procedures) and have you ever had to 'manage' the audio track etc please (ideally in W7/10, I don't have an Mac with access to a BD player and any Linux solution is likely to involve many CLI incantations). ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[Andy Burns]

I've used MakeMKV on linux a couple of times, it does take a bit of suck-it and see to extract the correct tracks (e.g you might get the director's cut, or foreign audio instead of the main film in English).

You'll have to lose a lot of quality squashing 50GB of BD onto a 4.7GB DVD ...

[Richard]

[T i m]

That was the bit I would need a bit of guidance on Andy. How would I know / find out which is the track I need?

I'm also likely to be squashing it into a smaller screen so may not even notice ... and not being able to watch it on the DVD equipped TV will have an even greater impact. ;-)

As an aside ... have you ever found yourself watch a 4x3 old TV show or even B/W and finding that you have 'forgotten' it's not 16x9 and HD?

Cheers, T i m

[T i m]

Thanks for that Richard. Unfortunately (re my current situation) it reflects pretty well what I've already done and doesn't seem to cover the bit I need, eg, the possibility of different audio tracks and how to select the right one? ;-(

I used the free eval version of AnyDVD to initially Rip the DVD and then Handbrake to turn into a single MKV file (that VLC plays fine) and I then used MKVMerge to try to select (or deselect) the audio tracks and Handbrake again, but with no success.

I did read that it can be down to the order the audio tracks appear and that it can simply pick up the first one it sees (which is the wrong one in my case) buy outside of MKVMerge, I couldn't see of anything that gave me an option to choose. ;-(

Maybe I'll try Make MKV instead to do the initial rip and go from there.

Cheers, T i m

[The Natural Philosopher]

There is no god but Handbrake on any platform

[T i m]

Re running the BD rip and then opening the main file with the default W10 media player it allows me to select different audio tracks and it looks like the 4Ch track No2 is the one I want (English with no description), but VLC didn't give me those options.

Then going back to Handbrake I tried selecting a different (but same sized) 'Main title' and that seemed to bring in a different range of audio tracks so I've selected one that looks a likely suspect and I'm encoding it now.

I'll find out if it works in ~3 hours. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[Andy Burns]

Not sure there's a way to know, file sizes mainly ...

[T i m]

So it seems.

I guess I'm a long way from fully understanding the various interactions as I've never really been into audio or video etc, so as long as I get there on this one that will be good enough for me for my S&G's exercise. ;-)

As I mentioned elsewhere, I normally buy the DVD version of any film I'm interested (rather than going to the cinema or streaming it etc) as I can play it in more things but with this I fancied the bonus features and thought I / we might appreciate the 'better quality on Mums bigger telly (when we were house sitting). I'm not sure with our eyes we could / did. ;-(

It has been known for me to go for the dual BD/DVD bundle when they are cheaper as that gives me the best of both worlds without the faf. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[jkn]

you can start watching the output file that Handbrake creates (eg. in VLC) as things progress, you don't have to wait until the conversion process has completed. Just wait until a few 10s of MB are there. That can help confirm that you are extracting the correct chapter/stream etc.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Some DVD DRM endoded shit can only be circumvented by recording what VLC produces using VLCS recod facility.

VLC is better at cracking DRM than handbrake.

[T i m]

Hmm, I have ~1.4GB of .mp4 file now and if I open it with VLC the progress bar just shoots across (in a second or so) but nothing else happens?

Could this pre finish playability depend on what OS it's running on (W10 here) or does it suggest the rip - encode process is broken somewhere?

Cheers, T i m

[Steve Walker]

I certainly prefer to stretch 4:3 video to full screen and ignore the distortion rather than have blank sections at each side. I don't really notice when I'm absorbed in what's going on.

SteveW

[Martin]

Newegg stuff seems to be shipped from the USA. Are the prices quoted including taxes?

[Andy Burns]

shudder.

[Johnny B Good]

I do that to check that my Dad's Army episodes are free of the green vertical line on the RHS of the cropped area that is at its most obvious when played back in full screen. Cropping neatly gets rid of the BBC DOG in the LHS pillar boxed area of the 960 by 540 of an sd1 download (or that of an SD 720 by 576 broadcast) otherwise I wouldn't bother using Handbrake to crop the mp4 or mpg files in the first place. Indeed, it's the very presence of the DOG in the left hand side of the picture that compromises Handbrake's auto-crop feature, requiring that the cropping be manually applied in these cases.

Likewise with widescreen movies (and the occasional TV programme that has, pointlessly, been cursed with a widescreen effect) where the DOG is outside of the active display area. If cropping doesn't completely eliminate the DOG without encroaching upon the active screen area, there's little benefit to be gained by cropping.

[Johnny B Good]

Yeuch! :-)

Yeah, I know, "Each to his own." and you can view a flat panel display at an offset angle from a reasonable distance to largely correct the AR distortion optically.

The blank sections either side of a 4:3 programme pillar boxed into a

16:9 display are far less a distraction, imho, than the otherwise resulting Fat Vision presentation, especially when the screen itself has a black bezel to help hide the fact of the 'Black Bars' which can, in turn be facilitated by viewing in a darkened room against a dark background.

[Richard]

Dunno.

Chat with them and ask:

[Johnny B Good]

Or "Yeuch!" :-)

[John Rumm]

Some of the BDs seem to have loads of redundant indexes to choose from - most of which will deliberately give you a broken video file (i.e bits in the wrong order, or wrong audio, or missing audi etc). Quite often you need to do a quick online search on the title first to find out which tracks to process with handbrake.

(with DVDs its usually obvious)