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DVD Ripping

Haywood

Haywood

Well-Known Member
Famous
Even after taking advantage of the UltraViolet disc-to-digital program and picking up a lot of back catalog titles along the way, I still have hundreds of movies on DVD. Some are not available via streaming. Some are not worth upgrading for various reasons (i.e. low budget classic kung fu movies look terrible in HD, because you can see all the wires). Some I want to either get the Blu-Ray or an HD streaming license for at some point. A few are out of print. Whatever the reason, I've still got hundreds of standard definition DVDs in my library.

Being unemployed afforded me a lot of time at my desk and I've been using that time to experiment with ripping both Blu-Rays and DVDs to my NAS. I was pleased to discover that creating a good H264 MKV DVD rip with no quality loss is no terribly difficult (Blu-Rays are much more complicated). First, I rip the disc using MakeMKV, which lets me dump the main movie, audio and subtitle files into an MKV container with no transcoding. Then, I run it through Handbrake to convert it to H264. The goal of this exercise is to create a file that is compatible with most devices, not to save space. While it is possible to compress a standard definition movie down to less than a gigabyte, my rips generally run over 3GB. Quality is the priority. These are the settings I use:

Container: MKV
Profile: High Profile
Constant Quality: 16
X264 Preset: Slow (Takes more time, but produces a smaller file without quality loss)
X264 Tune: Film (Unless it is hand-drawn animation)
Audio: Two tracks. One is AC3 or DTS pass-thru and the other is 256kbps AAC Stereo
Subtitles: I generally include the English subs. If there are forced subs, I burn them in.
Everything else is default values.

I use similar settings for Blu-Rays, but set the quality to somewhere between 18 and 21, depending on the movie. I try to keep the average bit-rate to somewhere around 12mbps. I should also note that I only compress the Blu-Rays that I also want to make available outside of my house. I will soon have full 1:1 rips of all of my Blu-Rays for local playback with full lossless audio.
 
I did not get into how long this takes or the best strategy for ripping a lot of discs. The time it takes for MakeMKV to create the initial container ranges from about 20 minutes on the low end to an hour on the high end. Half and hour is a good average. If you are ripping Blu-Ray discs and want full 1:1 quality, you are generally done at this point (things get more complex if there are forced subs). If you are ripping DVDs or compressing Blu-Rays, you then need to use Handbrake.

Handbrake takes about an hour (using the settings listed above) to convert a DVD to H264. Blu-Rays take anywhere from 3 to 12 hours depending on the settings you use and the disc you are working with. The best strategy is to do a bunch of movies with MakeMKV first, then build a queue of movies in Handbrake, so you can just kick it off and walk away. I've been doing 15-20 movies at a time, kicking it off in the evening and letting it run until it completes. I don't care if it runs all day, because my computer is powerful enough to be usable while that heavy transcoding load churns away in the background. Your mileage may vary.

Keep in mind that the times listed above are using a gaming laptop with a Core i7 mobile CPU. Times may increase or decrease depending on what you use. Memory and graphics cards make little to no difference. This is a CPU-intensive task. The more cores the merrier.
 
Yes, a quad i7 with Intel's Quicksync speeds up the process considerably :D

I haven't ripped any discs in a while but when I did, I used a 2011 Dell Inspiron desktop with a Pentium G630 processor (on par with first gen mobile i5 processor). A full 1:1 bluray rip took between 2 and 3 hours. I would rip three or four blurays during the day with MakeMKV and then let Handbrake run overnight to convert them to mp4 format with DD or DTS audio. Handbrake can do batch conversion.
 
lulimet said:
Yes, a quad i7 with Intel's Quicksync speeds up the process considerably :D

I haven't ripped any discs in a while but when I did, I used a 2011 Dell Inspiron desktop with a Pentium G630 processor (on par with first gen mobile i5 processor). A full 1:1 bluray rip took between 2 and 3 hours. I would rip three or four blurays during the day with MakeMKV and then let Handbrake run overnight to convert them to mp4 format with DD or DTS audio. Handbrake can do batch conversion.
Click to expand...

When I talked about using a Queue, I was talking about batch conversion. MakeMKV on my machine can rip a Blu-Ray in about 40 minutes. If I use a Handbrake quality level of 20-22 and a Medium encode speed, I can do a rip in 2-3 hours. If I use a quality level of 18-19 and the Slower encode speed, it takes an average of 10 hours and produces a 10-12GB file with a bit-rate of 12-15mbps.
 
Ok, so what the hell am I doing wrong? I ripped with the settings you had suggested but when I watch the movie on Plex (Playstation 4) it comes through in Stereo 2.0 only.
 
There are likely two soundtracks in the file. I always drag the AC3 pass-thru soundtrack to the top of the list, so it will be the default. Otherwise, you might have to select it manually.
 
Heywood,
I have another problem, hoping you can help me out please!! I have dumped movies off my old Panasonic DV recorder onto my NAS drive. All set to watch old home videos of kids through PLEX on the Playstation 4 and I get the message "The Server is not powerful enough to convert video". So apparently my little Synology 216Play doesn't have the ponies under the hood to do the job!! So , what are my options? BTW these are AVI files. SO can the PS4 do the job? Do I somehow leave a computer on and have it do it? Or do I have to convert these AVI files to something else like MP4's?
Thanks for any and all help you may have!!
Mike
 
Plex always transcodes on the server side to match the formats supported by the client. Most clients do not support the AVI format. The best way to solve this problem is to transcode the AVI files to H264. You can do it with Handbrake or let Plex create optimized versions (Plex Pass feature). The latter might take a long time, given your NAS. I recommend doing the former.
 
If you are using a NAS, you probably don't have a lot of CPU. Even my quad-core 2.0Ghz Celeron strains under the load. The safest bet is to make sure that everything is H264 and a manageable bit-rate (under 15mbps with 12 being a good target). Most clients will play that without transcoding, whether they be gaming consoles, streaming boxes or mobile devices.
 
Holy crap! I'm an idiot. I don't know why I didn't try this before. Sometimes I forget just how powerful the newer computers are. I am now running MakeMKV and Handbrake at the same time and it seems to be going off without a hitch. This is good, because I have hundreds of discs left to rip and it should save me some time.
 
Well, I finally finished. Every single DVD that I don't have on Vudu is now ripped to my NAS, except for three that would not rip for one reason or another. That was a LOT of work. On to the Blu-Rays!
 
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