Ripping BluRay to extender friendly format – What tool

[Meester.Rip]

I am signing up at TheGreenButton so I can ask questions about the Auto Rip and Compress tool. It seems that some people have luck with it, but it does seem to require a lot of software, MakeMKV, handbrake, dvdfab… And it also seems like the BluRay part of the app is still in its infancy. Does anyone here use a different tool to make extender friendly rips? I tried one several months ago. I think it was DVDFab and I think that rip stuttered and I could not get it to choose the right language. I am really surprised SlySoft hasn’t come out with a tool but after seeing how difficult of a time the people at TGB are having it must be a fairly complicated process.

[George L. Schmauch Jr.]

I use [url=http://www.curtpalme.com/node/]this[/url] to make my MKVs, but I don’t believe it will compress anything.  It also requires quite a bit of software, though.

[mikinho]

It really comes down to how Windows Media Center Extender “friendly” you want.  With MakeMKV you have a 1 click solution but it isn’t compressed and MKV playback works n extenders but the playback and playback controls are not as fluid as native formats.

[phoneguyinpgh]

[quote=”Skirge01″]
I use [url=http://www.curtpalme.com/node/]this[/url] to make my MKVs, but I don’t believe it will compress anything.  It also requires quite a bit of software, though.
[/quote]

Does that work for HD-DVDs as well???

[George L. Schmauch Jr.]

I was going to say it doesn’t, but I believe I did use it for HD-DVDs.  I think the only thing I had issues with were 1080i/60 Blu-rays, at which point I used MakeMKV.

[RehabMan]

I’ve had pretty good luck ripping HD-DVD discs to MKV with the HD-DVD/Blu-ray Stream Extractor combined with mkvmerge GUI (mmg) from the mkvtoolnix package.  You can google it for some guides and download it here: http://code.google.com/p/hdbrstreamextractor/.  It is a GUI front-end to eac3to.

Of course, you need something like AnyDVD to read commercial HD-DVD discs.

I’ve been taking advantage of some of the fire sales of HD-DVD movies on ebay and now have over 100 HD-DVD discs in my collection.  Lot’s of hard disk space used on my home server though…  But now I finally feel like I’ve received some value from my Xbox360 HD-DVD drive!!

[George L. Schmauch Jr.]

I’ve used that one in the past myself, but I wanted a single tool which would extract audio, video, chapters, and subtitles, then package them up into an MKV without me doing anything after choosing the tracks to extract.  It’s amazing just how difficult that has turned out to be.  I applaud the authors of these programs for writing them.

[Meester.Rip]

I need to download a MKV to see what the problem was on my extender. I could swear I ended up having to download the VLC player and watch the file on my HTPC.

[jennyfur]

I’m keeping an eye on this thread since I’m planning on eventually adding blu-ray to my setup. Right now, I’m using Auto Rip & Compress to rip my regular DVDs for extender usage (using MakeMKV) and it has worked great. I’d hoped it’d be an easy transition for blu-ray, but judging by this thread it sounds like it may not be so simple?

[George L. Schmauch Jr.]

That’s precisely why I held off for so long and only started doing it in the past month.  I wasn’t willing to struggle with multiple tools and command line editing.  When I found that tool I listed above (they really need to come up with an acronym!), I was ecstatic that there finally was a single tool to do everything I needed.  You set it up, it rips, creates subs, merges to MKV, and (optionally) deletes the remains.  While you have to install multiple programs, that GUI just needs to know where to find the .exe’s and it does the rest for you.

[George L. Schmauch Jr.]

I forgot to mention that there’s [url=http://www.mediasmartserver.net/2010/03/29/mkv-mania-another-eac3to-gui/]a guide[/url], in case you want to read through that.  If you have the storage space, you could even rip everything to your drives, then set this to run in batch on all of them.

The one feature I’m missing right now is a program which will trigger when a Blu-ray (or HD-DVD) is inserted and do all those steps without me doing a single other thing.  Other than that, I did ask the guy to include an option to embed cover art in the MKV, but with SageTV and BMT, that happens automatically when BMT sees the new file.

[Meester.Rip]

Now if I go down this road can I use mymovies via the extender interface to launch the MKV or will I have to use the default MCE movies folder?

[George L. Schmauch Jr.]

Someone else will have to respond to that, since I use SageTV.

[Tommywm22]

I just installed auto rip and compress last week and I am happy with how it works.  I configured mine with makeMKV and MetroskaSplitter and after 1.5 – 2 hours it spits out a uncompressed .wtv file.  Once all the external programs are installed and configured… it really is click it and forget it.  I did loose the skip chapter functionality, but someone motioned that using dvdfab could retain the chapters. Not a big deal to me. 

Also you can add any extention in the MyMovies options…  I added .wtv and it works fine.

[George L. Schmauch Jr.]

I kept having stuttering issues and audio sync problems with MakeMKV, however, it seemed to work fine on the ones the other tool couldn’t handle.  Very strange, but it worked out for me, so I’m not complaining.  I’m pretty sure I had issues with subtitles using MakeMKV, though, and wound up having to create them using another tool.

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