Best Guide to Backup your BluRay in mkv/mp4

sam9s

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Friends,

I have seen lot of request and curiosity for the best possible way to back up your BD disk. Following is the guide which I (and most of the professional rippers) follow to back up BD with custom quality measures for both audio and video so as you have full control over the final size of the output movie file.

Tools you would need .....

MakeMKV
Handbrake
AnyDVD HD

Ofcourse you need a BD ROM drive to read the discs.

PART 1 :::: The Ripping Process

STEP 1 : Make sure that AnyDVDHD is running at the background. Open MakeMKV and you shall be presented with the following screen.

makemkv.jpg


STEP 2 : Choose the correct source drive and the click on the "Bluray=>HDD" icon. You might be presented with the following error.

popuperror.jpg


Just click YES.

STEP 3 : After you click on yes MakeMKV will process the disc and will present you with the following screen

makemkvprocessingfinish.jpg


Select the main title (the max size) and remove everything else. Then click the drop down arrow against the main title and you will be presented with the Audio and subtitles options ........ review the snap below ...

makemkvchooseaudio.jpg


Every disc will either have DTS-HD or DD True HD for lossless audio AND DD 3/2+1 or DTS 3/2+1 for lossy audio. Now its up to you if you wanna keep lossless audio or lossy. I (and usually others as well) keep the lossy DTS or DD and remove all others. Similarly just check and opt english for subtitle and remove the rest.

Doing all of the above will itself save you 10-15 GB. Like for example my Night at the museum was 32GB initially and after all the above deductions was stripped down to 15GB file.:)

Mind you......... we have still not compressed anything, so the video is still at its full bit-rate and resolution (1080p). Audio also is at its full bit-rate (for DTS). All we have done is removed the extras and ofcourse HD Audio.

STEP 4 : After all is done choose the output folder and click on MakeMKV at the top right hand corner.

MakeMKV will start the ripping process. Now depending on your system configuration and power this process might take anything between 30 minutes to 2 Hours. As a reference mine took 26 minutes.

At the end we will have a the ripped mkv with a name something like title00.mkv

PART 2 :::: The Compression Process

Now we will try to compress the file by using codes like x264, reducing the resolution to 1280x720 (720p) and compressing the audio to AC3 or ACC.


STEP 1 : Open Handbreak and you will be presented with the following screen.

firsttab.jpg


STEP 2 : Now click on source and choose the title00.mkv file that we ripped using MakeMKV.

STEP 3 : Choose the destination. Choose MKV as the container. Now under the picture tab, under Anamorphic....change the option from "strict" to "None" from the drop down menu. Then change the resolution width from 1920 to 1280. The height would automatically change to 720. Make sure "keep aspect ratio" is selected.

STEP 4 : Now come to the video tab. Choose video codec as H.264. FPS same as source.

videotab.jpg


Now comes the quality part.

Quality can be defined by three ways .........

A. Target Size
B. AVG Bitrate
C. Constant Quality.


I personally prefer providing the size, which automatically determines the bit-rate and vice verse..... if you choose to provide the bitrate.

NOTE :: As a thumb rule, for each 1mbps (1000 kbps) bitrate the file size increases by 1GB. So for example if you define bitrate to be 5mbps (5000kbps) the file size would land to around 5GB ..... IMP ::: Assuming that you have chosen the resolution as 1280x720 and the audio is untouched i.e DTS (which the source has). The file size can further be decreased if the resolution is reduced or the audio is compressed to AAC.

STEP 5 : Now move to the audio tab. This is where we decide if we want to keep the source audio untouched i.e DTS or compress to AAC. Choose the source from the drop down menu and AAC or AC3 passthru from Audio Codec. As I sad I prefer audio untouched so you can see DTS passthru in my screen shot.

audiotab.jpg


STEP 6 : Move to subtitle track. Here though there is an option to chose hard coded subs, for some reason it did not work. I will research more on this. So I will suggest that you manually choose the SRT file by clicking on the Import SRT file.

subletrack.jpg


SRT Subs can be downloaded from the below link

Divxstation - subtitles [subscene.com]

Once that is done just click on START and the encoading will start. This is gonna be a looooooonnnngggg process :) specially if you machine is a bit of the older generation. The process can take anywhere starting from 1 hour to 5 hours ..... again as a reference my system took 45 minutes to complete the encoding.

My result file details are as follows ..... ....

filedetails.jpg


To view the result a 10MB sample file can be downloaded at below ...

Hotfile.com: One click file hosting: Sample-027.mkv

Hope this guide will clear the doubts as to how one can take a decent backup of the BDs......

For any queries fill the thread ....... :)

Regards
Sammy
 
Last edited:
A very detailed and point to point explanation. This will help those with blu-ray disks and BR Drives. Thanks.
 
Sam, supposing I have the HD space, can I just keep the Title0001.MKV and not process it through HandBrake? In other words can I keep the result of MakeMKV and use it as is?

Cheers
 
^^ Yep why not, it still is an mkv albeit uncompressed (which is the best part of MakeMKV BTW) and so all media players will play it. On computer as well......all players (VLC, MPC) will play the video just fine.
 
Thanks Sam for a detailed guide. Can you also let me know the hardware configuration you had for the ripping.

Thanks
 
Thanks Sam. Also add a part 2 guide on lossless backups, in case someone wants to store with menu options and without.
 
Thanks Sam. Also add a part 2 guide on lossless backups, in case someone wants to store with menu options and without.

Well ripping in ISO format is the best way to have lossless backup with all the menus intact. I will see if I can find a way in MakeMKV that lets you keep the menus and still provides the option to remove the rest like HD audio.
 
@Sam - Any particular reason why we need to keep AnyDVD running in the background??

You cannot simply copy/rip a BD disk because of the AACS copy protection.
AnyDVD HD removes that copy protection on the fly!, that is the reason we need AnyDVD HD running at the backgound. MakeMKV has its own copy protection removal tool that conflicts with AnyDVD HD that is why that error pop I shared. Buy I prefer/recomend AnyDVD HD over any other tool, hence instructed to click on YES on the error ..:)
 
Thanx a lot Sam...but i have a small trouble.I tried this with a Full BD copy of Sucker Punch and this was what was written in the NFO file:


Audio:
Audio: English / DTS-HD Master Audio / 5.1 / 48 kHz / 4105 kbps / 24-bit (DTS Core: 5.1 / 48 kHz / 1509 kbps / 24-bit)
* Audio: English / DTS Express / 1.0 / 48 kHz / 96 kbps / 16-bit

But after ripping untouched using MakeMKV, this is what i get when running MediaInfo:
unledtw.jpg




Am i doing something wrong??
 
^^ R U sure you are ripping via original DB, dont get me wrong but does not look like its a ripped file.
Anyway, the info says the file has two tracks (which would always be the case with an original DB as i mentioned in the tut as well). So if you have ripped the DB, you have managed to keep both the tracks, the HD Audio (DTA MA) Audio #1. and the DTS track Audio #2. Nothing wrong in it .....
 
Hi sam, I did my first rip of Knight and Day BD from moviemart subscription yesterday following this guide.

The 32GB BD came down to 22GB, great reduction. I kept both the lossless and lossy audio tracks since VLC was not working well with the lossless audio track on my normal PC.

Most importantly when I played the rip (no reduction in video) on my HT via my ASUS OPlay I observed that there is very minute anti aliasing issues in the PQ as compared to BD playback via my PS3. Any pointers? also the overall PQ was better with the actual BD playback via my PS3, file being 4GB + I cannot easily make PS3 play it (only way is UPnp) easily but will try that over this weekend.
 
If by anti-aliasing issues you mean minute jagged edges of the picture even I noticed that when I played my BD ISOs via my PlayON HD. One of the reasons along with no BD Menu support that made me switch to HTPC.... :)

I have always said HTPC PQ is noticeably better than any media player /....
 
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