www.makemkv.com

I'm a first-time user and just tried ripping a BluRay Disc of Payback: Straight Up (Director's Cut) - I didn't see any options regarding compression and at this point the output file seems to be bigger than the source data on the BluRay disc. What am I doing wrong?

MakeMKV doesn't do video recoding. Your options within MakeMKV are only to remove unneeded audio or subtitle tracks, which are NOT the major portion of the file size.

Other tools exist, both commercial and free, for compressing the files. I use handbrake, which you can get for free over at handbrake.fr, and the results of the compression can be spectacular... A typical animated feature can shrink to 10% of its original size, but something with lots of action or "noise" may only compress to 70% of original.

The resulting file is NOT bigger than the source. That's simply not possible unless you've duplicated audio streams. MakeMKV copies the media data unaltered from the blu ray m2ts files into MKVs, and MKV overhead is much smaller, therefore the resulting files will be smaller.

You're forgetting that a given MKV file could be constructed from multiple m2ts files, given "seemless branching" and play lists...

?

Any given file created by MakeMKV should be smaller than the files that it was created from. Unless of course seamless branching causes a single m2ts file to be used multiple times within a single playlist, which is possible but not likely, especially in this case.

It's a question of interpretation. What is the "source data" in the original message refer to?

If it's the sum total of the BD's data vs. the sum total of the MKV files generated, its quite easy for that to happen. Theatrical cut made up of 30 chapters, director's cut adds in 4 chapters, and MakeMKV creates two MKVs, "theatrical" and "director's cut", which add up to more than th 34 chapters on the BD.

If it's a comparison of a single MKV to a single m2ts file being ripped, then yes, it should ALWAYS be smaller by some percentage.

He used "output file" as a singular, otherwise I wouldn't have said anything.

Thanks for all the responses. I'm a beginner for sure. Makes sense now - been using MakeMKV to rip, then using Handbrake to Recode. Just trying to find the best settings for default to keep good HD/1080p copies of movies with at least Dolby Digital 5.1 surround with the files being too big.

I've created a free tool (Windows only) you can use for reducing your file size. The only requirement is that you have ffmpeg installed on your computer.

http://omniskore.com/public/Freebies/VideoResizer.exe