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

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!

By: kripz

kripz — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:53:04 +0000

Any updates on the new guide?

By: HyRax

HyRax — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 00:32:32 +0000

Good stuff! It’s great when you discover something new, isn’t it?

If you have an NVidia 8xxx series gfx card or later, I highly recommend you check out getting VDPAU running. Have a look a JYA’s website here – he maintains his own repository primarily dealing with VDPAU under MythTV, but he also has recent versions of the NVidia gfx drivers and modified versions of MPlayer that utilise VDPAU for very smooth, low-CPU (<10%) playback.

http://www.avenard.org/media/Home.html

By: Paully

Paully — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 21:24:13 +0000

HyRax

“dumping the decoding to my NVidia gfx card using VDPAU”

…aah, that’s how you do it. Nice.

BTW – used MakeMKV tonight for the first time (bugzilla Gentoo ebuild) and got my UK Blu-Ray disc of “I Am Legend” out to a 15Gb file. It actually did it. Amazing. This was unheard of 9 months ago…

…we are getting there!

Paully

By: HyRax

HyRax — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 22:59:47 +0000

Hi Paully,

That’s a nice and complex set of arguments for MPlayer there. You should look at putting your most-used arguments into an ~/.mplayer/config file so you don’t have to keep typing them all the time. Personally I just use “mplayer -fs mymoviefilename.blah” and my config file does everything else I need (which is simply dumping the decoding to my NVidia gfx card using VDPAU so no frameskips and bugger-all CPU usage – as smooth as playing back on a PS3 console).

As for the link you posted, yes – that is very similar to what my next guide is all about, though I don’t use MediaInfo because you can already glean a lot of info from tsMuxer itself. Hopefully I’ll have my article completed this weekend so you can compare your results.