First try, confused

[mojofizznut]

Hi, I learned about Makemkv over at thegreenbutton forums.
I wanted to record my blu ray disks, and play them on wmc without having to purchase a player. I thought wmc could read mkv output.

After 1 rip, the rip size was 38 gb! That is another problem, and although wmc can see the movie (it displays the movie poster) when I try to play it I get an error that I need to install a player that supports the format.

Is there a different format or something I'm supposed to select? I looked through the limited options and nothing jumped out at me that I should change. Also, is 38gb really what it should be? I want to preserve the full fidelity of the audio and video, but frankly at that large of a size, this is totally impractical for a home media storage solution.

[kryzchek]

MakeMKV will not do any transcoding to your source material, so the original audio/video is not compressed in any way. If the source video is indeed 38GB in size, you'll see a similarly-sized MKV outputted from MakeMKV.

I haven't used WMC (I used VLC Player which works fine with MKV files), but you may need to install a CODEC pack or Haali Media Splitter.

If you're concerned with file size, you could extract the video from an MKV file, reduce the file size using something like Xvid4PSP x264 compression, and remux it BACK into an MKV container. But this can be a very time and CPU intensive process.

[skittle]

Hi, I assume this is your first forage into the world of video archiving.

MakeMKV is simply decrypts and remuxes the streams from the disk into the matroska container. It does not reencode, so if you want smaller size files you need to reencode with another application. You can keep the audio as it is.

Second, WMC does not recognize mkv out of the box, although it does recognize H.264 in windows 7.
What OS are you using?

[MilesAhead]

For large .mkv playback I recommend you try the free Splash Lite player:
http://www.mirillis.com/splash.html

It has hardware acceleration for supported GPUs. It has its quirks but it's the only player I've tried so far where I can advance the slider while an .mkv is playing without hanging or crashing it. Subtitle support is limited to .srt afaik. The other good feature, it's designed for HD playback so it doesn't size the player window larger than your monitor resolution. No resizing with the mouse as soon as you start a video playing.

[mojofizznut]

Thanks for the help.
I've been using SlySoft products for years making copies of my DVDs I own, so I'm not exactly new 'video archiving,' but obviously, I'm a total novice in understanding encodings, transformers, and all of these acronyms. Although ironically I am a software developer, but I work in xml and server applications, not in media formats. I emailed SlySoft, and though they have the decryption capability now available in their AnyDVDhd product, they don't have the copy software ready yet (they are working on it). I've used their CloneDVD product for years and was hoping to just upgrade to that, but thought I'd investigate what is out there.

So my objective is simple. I'm trying to build out a home system where every TV monitor can watch hdtv, or view movies from our family media library (or music, or watch you tube etc). WMC is a good fit for this with a Win7 pc and tv tuner. Each WMC box will point to libraries on a home NAS storage I'm building. The typical file size for my DVD library is about 4gb per movie, and I knew with blu ray that would increase but I wasn't expecting 10x size increase. The machine I'm testing MakeMKV out on is a Win7 enterprise machine.

The objectives:
1) Store blu ray dvds I purchase in a digital format on the NAS, that WMC can view and play while preserving all the audio and video greatness of Blu Ray (because at least one of the WMC machines will be a part of a high-end home theatre setup).
2) Keep the file size manageable. At 45gb size (I just did a second one, the 40 year old virgin) is unmanageable. That would require an enormous NAS investment for those sizes.

So it sounds like MakeMKV is not really what I need (as I purchased the AnyDVDhd decoder already) since it isn't doing the transcoding I may need, and it's not clear it can do the compression I might need to reduce the size. Or am I missing how to use some of the features? I just don't see options in the panel to choose a format or choose a compression strategy.

What is the purpose/advantage of simply copying media into a matroska container? I read up on Wikipedia about this, but I'm not really seeing why this is a good thing to do for media archival. Is there a FAQ or something to help me understand the reason to do this?

So after completing two rips, I'm even further confused.

First try, Blu Ray "Synedoche New York" (Amazing film btw). It did NOT create any MKV files, but rather a huge folder structure with a lot of .m2ts files that I can tell. But then in my 2nd try with "The 40 Year Old Virgin" it did NOT create any folders, but just a lengthy 20 or so .mkv files.

The wierd thing is, WMC sees the Synedoche New York movie and displays the poster, but does not see/show the 40 year old Virgin at all.

I'm sorry this is such a basic post. Any good primers to catch up on all of this and understand formats/encoders/transcoders?

thx

[kryzchek]

As I'm sure you've discovered, there's no way to FULLY preserve the quality of an HD movie while keep the file size manageable. Think of it like ripping a CD to mp3 format--you're trading some audio fidelity/quality for a much smaller file size.

Regardless, this tradeoff is acceptable to most people (and even hardly noticeable to some), so it's a worthwhile endeavor. Like I said above, I simply use the XVid4PSP product to re-encode the file to something smaller (closer to 10GB). MakeMKV doesn't have any ability to re-encode (ie compress) your files. It works only with the original audio and video.

People like using the MKV container because it's open source. There are no royalties associated with it, so anyone can make use of it. For me, the advantage is the MKV support on the Popcorn Hour devices, and easy http streaming ability.

[setarip_old]

Hi!

First try, Blu Ray "Synedoche New York" (Amazing film btw). It did NOT create any MKV files, but rather a huge folder structure with a lot of .m2ts files that I can tell. But then in my 2nd try with "The 40 Year Old Virgin" it did NOT create any folders, but just a lengthy 20 or so .mkv files.

That's because MakeMKV is an impressive MULTIFUNCTION tool - and on these two occasions, you selected two different functions ;>}

One of its functions is to convert BluRays to MKVs.

Another of its functions (recently added) is the ability to DUPLICATE (either decrypted or still encrypted) BluRay discs, much in the same fashion as DVDFab Passkey and AnyDVDHD.

[tkpittman]

It sounds like you are selecting everything and not selecting the main movie and the individual audio streams. I have 40 year old virgin ripped to MKV with makemkv and it is under 20GB (movie only and main audio stream). This is lossless quality and works great.
I have a few movies over 30GB (Godfather is 35GB and Transformers 2, Hurt Locker etc. ) are enormous. On average most of my bluray mkv's range between 17-25 GB.

[mojofizznut]

Great input, thx all for your help. I'll dig into this deeper. 20gb is ok, not great but I think that will be somewhat manageable.

I tried to locate some kind of 'getting started' guide or faq - highly suggest you folks put something together, or have more stickies on the forum for getting started. I didn't select different options in the tool between my two tests, so not sure what happened there and why the different output. All I changed was output location I thought - but I'll kick it around some more.

Cheers

[NomadCF]

Also keep in mind that you can do "Extra" steps to save on space with out losing quality. A quick example of this are encoding audio streams of DTS-HD (MA or HR), TrueHD or PCM to FLAC. Or even simpler is to choose the elements on the disc that best fits you. An example of this would be to choose a (audio) AC3 stream any other audio stream type, If space is a concern.


Also if your willing to lose a *bit* of quality have the Video resized to 720 from 1080 will save you a considerable amount, But I look at it this way if your going to take the time to rip a full Bluray. are you really going to be ok with a downgraded 720 version ? (Side note: I personally do tend to side with a downgraded version 720P. Not sure why really.,But when it's done good. I can't tell the difference).