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Moving from Blu-Ray ISO to MKV - What to expect?


crashkelly

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crashkelly

Hi,

 

In an earlier conversation today in a different thread it was suggested that having Blu-ray rips stored as MKV rather than ISO would provide better functionality with MB. I can for sure see that it is easier, no mounting and no external player, but I was wondering what else I would run into or have to configure if I chose to go that route.

 

In my current setup I rip my Blu-rays with DVDFab and keep only the main movie, high definition audio, and the English subs and write them to the ISO format. I know I can use MakeMKV to rip the Blu-ray and select out what I want, but when it comes to playback, is there anything else, like further configuration of LAV, that will have to be done.

 

Also, is there anything to deal with 3D Blu-ray ripping where I do not have to change the 3D format? (Does it even matter if you do?)

 

I have in general been happy with the ISO rips, but if it can be better/easier I would love to learn and go that route.

 

Thanks for any info

 

Cheers

Edited by crashkelly
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Posting this question here, since I feel it's relative to the topic.

 

Been using ISO as well, and seeing this post makes me query as well.

 

Currently trying to convert my 3D Bluray to MKV, just not working.  I want the mkv to have the full res 3D treatment exactly like the bluray, so when playing the TV automatically changes to 3D viewing.  Can this be done?
 

Also have a movie with the Theatrical and Directors Cut on the Bluray.  How do I put both these in the same file, so that in MediaBrowser Classic or MBT I can just select a menu to change it.  I'd rather not have two separate files.

Or are  BDMV folders better?  Does MB Server do chapter thumbnails etc for BDMV folders?  Does MB Classic or MBT play BDMV folders?

Edited by DigiTM
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crashkelly

Well that was easy :D

 

Did a test last night/ this morning by ripping Star Trek: Wrath of Khan using MakeMKV. Selected out the DolbyTrueHD 7.1 track and the English subs, took about 20 minutes or so to complete.

 

Copied it over to my media drives and then ran it through MBC, let MB grab the metadata and set things up and then I played it. First go around I did not get the DolbyTrueHD 7.1 so I stopped the movie and went into the LAV Audio setup and selected to bitstream Dolby TrueHD and DTS-MA and tried again. DolbyTrueHD showed up on my receiver right away and the sound difference was very apparent.

 

No waiting, no mounting, no TMT, just a movie that played. Love it!!! :D

 

Now I just need to get CoverArt to show the Blu-ray cover for this/these movies. Pretty sure it has to do with setting up a profile, treatments, and specific covers. I will play

 

Cheers

 

EDIT: Got it :P

 

Now, have a coffee and decide on converting 350 BD ISOs to MKV :o

Edited by crashkelly
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Also have a movie with the Theatrical and Directors Cut on the Bluray.  How do I put both these in the same file, so that in MediaBrowser Classic or MBT I can just select a menu to change it.  I'd rather not have two separate files.

 

Or are  BDMV folders better?  Does MB Server do chapter thumbnails etc for BDMV folders?  Does MB Classic or MBT play BDMV folders?

 

This can't be done except through an external player. Seamless branching will not be implemented most likely ever in MBT or MBC. You need an external player or come to the realization that BDs with seamless branching or full menus require a separate hardware player with hacked custom firm ware.

 

Look at this thread and notice EBR's & LUKE's comments.

http://mediabrowser.tv/community/index.php?/topic/826-where-is-mbtheater/page-2

Edited by On2Go
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Xzener

I have been on the fence for a while converting my folder rips to MKV... I can honestly say, MBT's internal play along with LAV filters play my folder rips very well. They look beautiful, and playback with HD audio too.

 

I also have Bluray 3D in ISO format, external players is the only option for 3D at the moment. I'm hoping the Devs can implement 3D playback with MBTs internal player in the future.

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crashkelly

I have been on the fence for a while converting my folder rips to MKV... I can honestly say, MBT's internal play along with LAV filters play my folder rips very well. They look beautiful, and playback with HD audio too.

 

I also have Bluray 3D in ISO format, external players is the only option for 3D at the moment. I'm hoping the Devs can implement 3D playback with MBTs internal player in the future.

 

I can definitely say that the mkv format is much simpler, so far anyway, but it is going to be a lot of work to convert everything. I think it would be even tougher in your situation since your folder rips are already playing directly in MBT.

 

As a bonus though, it is just one file rather than an entire folder structure for the bd rip ;)

 

Cheers

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Xzener

Actually, its not difficult at all... Just time consuming. Every single one of my folder rips are simply the movie. MakeMKV will easily convert all my movies with HD audio, but I just don't have time to do it.

 

I'm very happy with the way MB3 handles my BD rips and dont intend on converting them.

Edited by Xzener
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I can honestly say, MBT's internal play along with LAV filters play my folder rips very well. They look beautiful, and playback with HD audio too.

 

There is no question about the quality that LAV filters with madVR renderer will produce, have you though tested interlaced VC1 content and checked for smooth playback dropped frames? While it is true that folder rips will play on the internal player, it still leaves you with the problem of seamless branching when you have an extended and theatrical cut in the same release as well as the headache for using BD lite menus (filenames) when navigating TV shows or having to rip the disc to individual episodes. As I mentioned many times before, I am getting used to having more then one playback device for my content. At present I have two and toying wih the idea of adding a third. Each one does one or two things best. Hardware decoding using devices with Sigma chips will definetly beat software decoding in PCs when it comes to deinterlacing or BluRay players like Pioneer BDP-62FD with custom firm ware will produce better video quality from BluRays as well as no restrictions when it comes to playback.

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crashkelly

Actually, its not difficult at all... Just time consuming. Every single one of my folder rips are simply the movie. MakeMKV will easily convert all my movies with HD audio, but I just don't have time to do it.

 

I'm very happy with the way MB3 handles my BD rips and dont intend on converting them.

 

I can agree with that. If everything is working as you want it without external players and what not, why go through all the time and hassle of conversion.

 

Cheers

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Folder rips are always more difficult, so if multiple platforms and multiple devices interest you, then they're not the way to go. Xzener, since you have dev access, take a look at Tikuf's comments from yesterday about my question about seeking with folder rips. Since you have a roku I would think that would be enough to convince you.

 

But if all you use is an htpc, and if that's all you ever plan on using, then iso's and folder rips should be fine, albeit with some minor annoyances such as our inability to extract chapter images.

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  • 2 weeks later...
Mark Anderson

Well that was easy :D

 

Did a test last night/ this morning by ripping Star Trek: Wrath of Khan using MakeMKV. Selected out the DolbyTrueHD 7.1 track and the English subs, took about 20 minutes or so to complete.

 

Copied it over to my media drives and then ran it through MBC, let MB grab the metadata and set things up and then I played it. First go around I did not get the DolbyTrueHD 7.1 so I stopped the movie and went into the LAV Audio setup and selected to bitstream Dolby TrueHD and DTS-MA and tried again. DolbyTrueHD showed up on my receiver right away and the sound difference was very apparent.

 

No waiting, no mounting, no TMT, just a movie that played. Love it!!! :D

 

Now I just need to get CoverArt to show the Blu-ray cover for this/these movies. Pretty sure it has to do with setting up a profile, treatments, and specific covers. I will play

 

Cheers

 

EDIT: Got it :P

 

Now, have a coffee and decide on converting 350 BD ISOs to MKV :o

 

This is something I'd like to do, but previously when I;ve tried with MKV, I've had problems like no chapter support during playback, even though the MKV contains chapters. Does next/prev schapter work for you?

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crashkelly

 

Well that was easy :D

 

Did a test last night/ this morning by ripping Star Trek: Wrath of Khan using MakeMKV. Selected out the DolbyTrueHD 7.1 track and the English subs, took about 20 minutes or so to complete.

 

Copied it over to my media drives and then ran it through MBC, let MB grab the metadata and set things up and then I played it. First go around I did not get the DolbyTrueHD 7.1 so I stopped the movie and went into the LAV Audio setup and selected to bitstream Dolby TrueHD and DTS-MA and tried again. DolbyTrueHD showed up on my receiver right away and the sound difference was very apparent.

 

No waiting, no mounting, no TMT, just a movie that played. Love it!!! :D

 

Now I just need to get CoverArt to show the Blu-ray cover for this/these movies. Pretty sure it has to do with setting up a profile, treatments, and specific covers. I will play

 

Cheers

 

EDIT: Got it :P

 

Now, have a coffee and decide on converting 350 BD ISOs to MKV :o

 

This is something I'd like to do, but previously when I;ve tried with MKV, I've had problems like no chapter support during playback, even though the MKV contains chapters. Does next/prev schapter work for you?

 

 

To be honest I have not tried it as I am still busy redoing my collection of BD ISOs to MKV. I will make a point of it tomorrow though and let you know.

 

Just want to reiterate though, at this point I am only doing 2D as I still need to investigate 3D a bit more as I am not sure what effect, if any, ripping it to something like MKV has on the 3D output

 

Cheers

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steelman1991

@@Mark Anderson

 

Chapter support is more of an issue with the player used, rather than the rip process. If you are attempting to use WMC for playback there is no native support for chapter search - merely moving in time increments.

 

Most external players support chapter skip (mpc-hc, vlc etc.).

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At one stage makemkv had a small issue with making the decode timestamps properly (this can affect chapter image extraction) can someone test on their one of their new mkv's and confirm that the chapter image extraction is functioning as it should. Eric posted in their forums about 7 months ago about this and there has been no update to that thread.

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Despite that bug I still think MakeMkv is the best tool for those who want to do it easily. It's not something you can automate though. Always needs to be done manually to make sure you get the right tracks.

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I too am looking at converting my iso collection to mkv. What I found is a tool to batch convert iso to mkv on the MakeMKV forum.. I've used MakeMKV for some time but have only converted a few iso's to mkv. But now it looks like a easy thing to do..

 

Take a look and see if it works for you.

 

http://www.makemkv.com/forum2/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=6556

 

Rew

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Yuck. Just doing Now You See Me through MakeMKV, there are a dozen tracks all identical in size that fit the movie.  Some of the Bluray's I have are nasty with this where multiple titles are all the same but slightly different in seconds.  Never done mkv from ISO, it's been hard on some titles.  LPCM audio is hard to put in mkv properly, and selecting the right forced subs are tricky with some titles such as Star Wars.  How do others do this, with a guarantee of knowing which track to select etc?

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Yuck. Just doing Now You See Me through MakeMKV, there are a dozen tracks all identical in size that fit the movie.  Some of the Bluray's I have are nasty with this where multiple titles are all the same but slightly different in seconds.  Never done mkv from ISO, it's been hard on some titles.  LPCM audio is hard to put in mkv properly, and selecting the right forced subs are tricky with some titles such as Star Wars.  How do others do this, with a guarantee of knowing which track to select etc?

Yeah I think this is a new form of copy protection. Basically a bunch of different versions and most are slightly messed up with a few scenes out of order. Your best way to know the correct one is to pop it into a player and load it up and see exactly how long the video is in hours, minutes, seconds. There is usually only one of the tracks that is that exact time. The rest will be off by a second or two.

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Generally I look up the actual movie runtime (whether it be from IMDB or tmdb) and grab the one that is closest to the movie run time. I have run into this playlist thing quite a lot (they look to be putting scenes in from the directors commentary etc just to be a pita).

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crashkelly

Generally I look up the actual movie runtime (whether it be from IMDB or tmdb) and grab the one that is closest to the movie run time. I have run into this playlist thing quite a lot (they look to be putting scenes in from the directors commentary etc just to be a pita).

 

Exactly what I do as well. The actual runtime will tell all. Luckily for me when I originally ripped to ISO I went through this already so now that I am converting to MKV I just set MakeMKVBatchConverter to grab everything.

 

Cheers

 

MakeMKVBatchConverter link originally posted by Tikuf, credit where credit is due ;)

 

http://www.makemkv.com/forum2/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=6556

 

EDIT: I can currently testing the above software. Have only done a couple of ISOs for testing, but so far so good. I will post any results to http://mediabrowser.tv/community/index.php?/topic/1559-bluray-3d-to-mkv-11/

Edited by crashkelly
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CWNashvegas

Yeah I think this is a new form of copy protection. Basically a bunch of different versions and most are slightly messed up with a few scenes out of order. Your best way to know the correct one is to pop it into a player and load it up and see exactly how long the video is in hours, minutes, seconds. There is usually only one of the tracks that is that exact time. The rest will be off by a second or two.

Stuff like this makes me glad I'm still on DVD. They can be infected with dummy titles, too, but at least I can just open them in MPC-HC and make note of the valid title numbers.

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Stuff like this makes me glad I'm still on DVD. They can be infected with dummy titles, too, but at least I can just open them in MPC-HC and make note of the valid title numbers.

While I don't enjoy the newest form of protection, it isn't that bad. I'll take better picture and sound quality any day over a little hassle with the one time ripping.

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