Comments on: HowTo: Encode a Blu-ray rip into a smaller format without losing quality

By: Thomas C.

Thomas C. — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 20:25:07 +0000

Hi!

Thanks for your nice script..

I hacked it a little bit, becouse I had no space to copy the file to a writeable folder.

woth my version you can give the full file as input and optionally a folder for output.

http://pastebin.com/9TUu94pE

Regards!
Thomas

By: Donald

Donald — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 23:16:13 +0000

Hi,

I found the options =>
b_pyramid=none, b_pyramid=strict and
b_pyramid=normal

I used “normal” and it worked.

Thanks for the help.

By: HyRax

HyRax — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 02:33:00 +0000

The version of MEncoder supplied with Ubuntu Lucid has had some of its parameters changed, and this is why your encode is failing. The “b_pyramid” parameter no longer accepts the argument used in the script and needs to be changed (b_pyramid now has options!). Check MEncoder’s man page for the possible arguments to use here and substitute accordingly, eg: b_pyramid=option.

I’ll make a note about it in the article later.

By: Donald

Donald — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 01:02:12 +0000

I tried your script on Ubuntu 10.04, it did work very well in 9.10 – but it looks like 10.04 broke the script.

donald@hpp6230y:~/NEWS/monsters.vs.aliens/BDMV/STREAM
> time /home/donald/encode_video.sh 00000
MEncoder SVN-r1.0~rc3+svn20090426-4.4.3 (C) 2000-2009 MPlayer Team
Option x264encopts: Bad argument b_pyramid=(null)
success: format: 0 data: 0×0 – 0xee659000
TS file format detected.
VIDEO H264(pid=4113) NO AUDIO! NO SUBS (yet)! PROGRAM N. 1
FPS seems to be: 23.976044
[V] filefmt:29 fourcc:0×10000005 size:0×0 fps:23.976 ftime:=0.0417
Opening video filter: [expand osd=1]
Expand: -1 x -1, -1 ; -1, osd: 1, aspect: 0.000000, round: 1
==========================================================================
Opening video decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg’s libavcodec codec family
Selected video codec: [ffh264] vfm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg H.264)
==========================================================================
VDec: vo config request – 1920 x 1080 (preferred colorspace: Planar YV12)
VDec: using Planar I420 as output csp (no 1)
Movie-Aspect is 1.78:1 – prescaling to correct movie aspect.
FATAL: Cannot initialize video driver.

Exiting…
MPlayer SVN-r1.0~rc3+svn20090426-4.4.3 (C) 2000-2009 MPlayer Team
mplayer: could not connect to socket
mplayer: No such file or directory
Failed to open LIRC support. You will not be able to use your remote control.

Playing 00000.m2ts.
TS file format detected.
VIDEO H264(pid=4113) AUDIO A52(pid=4353) NO SUBS (yet)! PROGRAM N. 1
Core dumped

Exiting… (End of file)
Cannot find H264 start code
Error importing 00000.x264: BitStream Not Compliant
mkvmerge v3.0.0 (‘Hang up your Hang-Ups’) built on Dec 29 2009 00:21:20
Error: The source file ’00000.mp4′ could not be opened successfully, or retrieving its size by seeking to the end did not work.
All done! Your final movie file is called 00000.mkv – enjoy!

real 0m41.953s
user 0m8.040s
sys 0m8.980s
donald@hpp6230y:~/NEWS/monsters.vs.aliens/BDMV/STREAM
donald@hpp6230y:~/NEWS/monsters.vs.aliens/BDMV/STREAM
> ls -larth *.m2ts
-rw-r–r– 1 donald donald 3.8G 2009-11-07 15:22 00000.m2ts
-rw-r–r– 1 donald donald 3.8G 2009-11-07 15:24 00001.m2ts
-rw-r–r– 1 donald donald 224M 2009-11-07 15:24 00002.m2ts

By: My Personal Diary » MKV to VOB on PS3

My Personal Diary » MKV to VOB on PS3 — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 09:08:29 +0000

[...] HowTo: Encode a Blu-ray rip into a smaller format without losing quality [...]

By: HyRax

HyRax — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 14:06:32 +0000

I use MEncoder to re-encode my BD’s and I’ve never had any issues, including VC-1 discs.

By: Jason

Jason — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 22:40:13 +0000

Well, turns out my problem was with VC-1 encoded BD’s specifically. I do not have the proper codec to encode them.

Any suggestions? I’m using the ffmpeg from Medibuntu.

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:54:43 +0000

Hey, thanks for that! I’ll play around a bit more once I get it working again. (I installed Ubuntu 9.10 64 bit and apparently ffmpeg doesn’t have all the necessary codecs for encoding x264 on the 64 bit system. So now I’m going to have to compile ffmpeg on my own it seems.)

By: HyRax

HyRax — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 23:00:38 +0000

Hi Jason,

I should update this article – the 4GB tends to apply to animated movies only. Other movies compression will vary. Generally i expect to bring down an average “live actor” movie to no less than 8GB. Anything less tends to have noticeable quality loss in comparison to the original Blu-ray.

Generally movies with high detail will not compress down as much. Typical examples include Batman Begins and Babel.

Personally I find quality to be more important than file size. I am considering a short article discussing playing with the crf value with examples of results it can produce, but as I said, this is an arbitrary figure that will provide different results for different movies. I could safely say, however, that I am averaging about 12GB across all my movies.

By: Jason

Jason — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:11:07 +0000

Question, you said that with the mencoder quality set to 21 you get an average video size of 4 gig. My average, thus far, has been around 10 gig. I adjusted the number to 23 just to see what would happen, and the quality still looks great but the file size didn’t change all that much either. Since it takes so long to encode, any suggestions on a number to use that would get me in the 4 gig per movie range? Thanks!