Ripping Blu-ray movies

[GreenT]

I see a lot of people doing this now, and I like to experiment on things which is probably I haven't released anything in 4 years, but it'd be cool to know how to rip blu-rays still. Are there certain programs? How much data is expected to taken up? What kind of files do you get when you rip, and how do you convert the files into editable footage?

[Qyot27]

1) Probably DVDFab HD Decrypter, or AnyDVD HD. At least until a widely-stable equivalent to libdvdcss comes along. I won't have the ability to experiment with this for a while, though, so I can't say definitely.

2) A single-layer Blu-ray Disc is 25 GB, the dual layer ones are 50. Expect at most those sorts of numbers. If you want bitrate, look at it this way = DVD allows a maximum video bitrate of 9800kbps. Blu-ray's, if I recall correctly, is somewhere between 40,000kbps and 50,000kbps.

3) Typically, H.264 in MPEG-2 Transport Streams (.m2ts). If the stuff's been decrypted, then it seems the prevailing option lately is to transmux the H.264 streams to MKV (at the very least MakeMKV seems to do this for you from disc to file, but I'm unsure if it's only a transmuxer, or does transcoding too - you'll want to avoid transcoding if at all possible), and then open said MKVs with FFmpegSource2. Aside from that, the editing process is exactly the same except they're just a lot bigger in resolution - 1920x1080 or 1280x720 as opposed to 640x480/848x480. Interlacing and pulldown trickery are still possible to be encountered, but I don't know the exact specifics of them.

Blu-ray does support MPEG-2 and VC-1, but those were only 'common' in the format's early days (VC-1 did seem to be the prevailing format used on HD-DVD, though). From the impression I get of the situation, virtually every release of note, and probably all the anime released, in the last couple years has used H.264. The audio can be a lot trickier to deal with, but for AMV editing that probably has just about zero relevance anyway.

[mirkosp]

All this info is supposed to go in the updated avtech that should be released in a matter of days hopefully, but for the time being, here's the info you need:
1) In order to rip Blu-rays you can use DVDFab. Notice that the free version of DVDFab won't be able to decrypt Blu-rays that have new encryption algorithms until a couple months later than the payware version. If you don't have DVDFab, you can get it here.
2) Blu-rays can take any amount of space, really. Expect up to even 50 GBs of stuff to be extracted. Or you could be "lucky" and make do with even less than 20GBs of data per disc. Once you got it extracted, navigate to the "\BDMV\STREAM" subfolder to find .m2ts files. Some blu-rays have one episode per m2ts, so you'll have to look for the m2ts that weight the most, and you're likely to have the eps in there. Other blu-rays have all the episodes stacked together in a single huge m2ts. There's no way to know which .m2ts holds the eps in your Blu-ray until you check, but it's not hard. But now it gets tricky. Once you found the .m2ts, you'll want to load them in avisynth. You have a bunch of ways:
- You can use DSS2("blablabla.m2ts") and convert the whole thing to lossless for editing. Making clips in virtualdub should be okay, but avoid trims inside the script, as they sometimes fuck up with some m2ts for some reason or another that I still haven't quite figured out for sure. If you appear to not have the DSS2 function, then you can go to C:\Program Files\Combined Community Codec Pack\Filters\Haali, copy the avss.dll and paste it into the C:\Program Files\AviSynth 2.5\plugins folder. Of course, this is assuming you have CCCP installed.
- You can use ffmpegsource/ffmpesource2/ffvideosource to load them. I never had much luck with them with huge files, even when I get the indexing done, so I don't personally recommend it for blu-rays, but might work.
- You can use DGDecNV. It's not exactly free software and it requires you to have an NVidia gpu with CUDA support, which you might not have. Alternatively you might "luck out" (but not really) and have MPEG-2 m2ts (which is possible). If that is the case, then you can load the m2ts in DGIndex and use the old mpeg2source way as with DVDs, but MPEG-2 m2ts at 1080p look... like shit, and I am not kidding. If your m2ts is AVC then you could try using the last build of DGAVCIndex, but it's quite outdated, doesn't assure frame accuracy and might just flat out fail with your m2ts. If you have a VC-1 m2ts, then I'm afraid that either you get an NVidia GPU with CUDA support and buy the DGDecNV, or resort to one of the other two ways (personally I recommend DSS2).
As you can see, you'll need quite a bit of space to hold the various GBs worth of data. A 25 minute AVC m2ts at 1080p23.976 (which is pretty much the most common format for japanese blu-rays) will weight about 5 GBs. Once converted to Lagarith you can expect it to weight over 5 times that - this one episode I'm basing my data on is 26.9 GB as lagarith. American and European Blu-rays are more likely to be VC-1 which might weight a bit more than AVC as an m2ts, but it doesn't change a thing to you once converted to lagarith.
On the plus side quality is generally stunning, with most of the filtering requirements being debanding and in some cases antialiasing. Unless the blu-ray you got is some upscale, blurriness won't be an issue, and even if it is upscale to 1080p, downscaling to 720p before converting to lagarith won't be hard, and in fact will help saving a lot of space over 1080p: an anime episode at 720p will likely be around 10GB in lagarith, versus the about 25GB lagarith for 1080p as stated earlier on.
In any case, once you got the lagarith ready, then you're good. Adobe programs seem to dislike big files when directly loaded so you'll want to load these lagariths through an avisource in avisynth and put the avs in premiere or after effects. If you use vegas to edit, then loading them directly should be safe, although I don't use vegas so I don't know.
That should be all the info you need. If you want me to expand on some part, though, feel free to ask.

EDIT: Hurf, qyot got me beat to it.

[Qyot27]

- You can use DSS2("blablabla.m2ts") and convert the whole thing to lossless for editing. Making clips in virtualdub should be okay, but avoid trims inside the script, as they sometimes fuck up with some m2ts for some reason or another that I still haven't quite figured out for sure. If you appear to not have the DSS2 function, then you can go to C:\Program Files\Combined Community Codec Pack\Filters\Haali, copy the avss.dll and paste it into the C:\Program Files\AviSynth 2.5\plugins folder. Of course, this is assuming you have CCCP installed.
- You can use ffmpegsource/ffmpesource2/ffvideosource to load them. I never had much luck with them with huge files, even when I get the indexing done, so I don't personally recommend it for blu-rays, but might work.

Likely the reason for that is weirdness maintaining correct timecodes in TS streams. Both DSS2 and FFmpegSource are forced to use Haali's Splitter to handle them. This is why the advice for using FFMS2 is to get the streams out of the .m2ts files and into MKV, which can be handled correctly.

It's also a lot faster and easier to do the indexing for FFMS2 through ffmsindex, which doesn't require trying to open the damn things in a media player to get AviSynth and the plugin itself to do it. However, ffmsindex is still currently a CLI app, although there is talk of it getting a Qt-based GUI. The simplest way to operate ffmsindex is to:

1) Add C:\Program Files\AviSynth 2.5\plugins, where ffmsindex usually gets dropped, to Windows' PATH (Control Panel->System->Advanced->Environment Variables - find the PATH entry, click Edit, and add that absolute path to AviSynth's plugins folder at the end; you might need to put a semi-colon there first, if one's not already there...semi-colons are what separate each entry from the next).

2) Alternately, you can just drop ffmsindex in C:\WINDOWS or C:\WINDOWS\system32, which are both automatically recognized on the PATH. The downside to doing it this way, though, is that you have to remember to update it every time you update ffms2 - if you add the plugins folder to the PATH, then it updates automatically due to the old version being overwritten or replaced.

In either case, all you have to do is open a Command Prompt and navigate to the directory with your .mkv files (or use the Open Command Prompt Here shell extension to be right there without navigating - Vista and Win7 users can right-click while holding down Shift to bring up the option, but it's easier not to have to remember to hold down Shift), and then type or copy-paste the following command and hit enter:

Code: Select all

ffmsindex -t -1 [name_of_file.mkv]

Replace [name_of_file.mkv] with the actual name of the file*, and remember that if the filename has spaces in it, you need to put quotes around it, just like how AviSynth scripts operate (technically, though, you can get away with putting only one quotation mark at the beginning of the filename/path; Windows assumes the closing one is there automatically if the first one is, provided the filename is the very last thing in the command - so it is safer to bound it with quotes on both sides, just in case). The -t -1 part is optional; that will index the audio too, so you can use atrack=-1 with FFmpegSource2() in your script. For this you probably won't need to do that, but for other types of video conversion you might. The script you create will refer to the original MKV file, not to the index file. It'll pick up and use the index file as usual, though.


*Another shell extension, Ninotech Path Copy (here) can be used to copy the filename so you can paste it into the Command Prompt or a script or so on. Like the Open Command Prompt Here option, Vista and Win7 do have this option available automatically as 'Copy as Path', which can be found the exact same way - holding Shift and then right-clicking. It comes as an .inf file, so there may be extra hoops to jump through to get it to install right on Vista or Win7. It does, however, come with both 32 and 64 bit versions - although I don't know how well the 64-bit one works. I use the 32-bit version all the time on XP - my only quibble with it is that it can't recognize foreign codepages, and therefore copies Japanese text as a bunch of question marks. I have to use ExplorerXP's Copy Filename function, or the traditional Right-click->Rename->Copy method to do it.

[treemme96]

I see a lot of people doing this now, and I like to experiment on things which is probably I haven't released anything in 4 years, but it'd be cool to know how to rip blu-rays still. Are there certain programs? How much data is expected to taken up? What kind of files do you get when you rip, and how do you convert the files into editable footage?

I ripped my blu-rays to MKV. I watch the video using my WD HD TV Media Player and the quality is good

[treemme96]

I dont like AnyDVD HD:
1.Without format conversion function,output ISO or .TS, .M2TS files only and we need to rely on the third party software to transfer format, spend too much.
2. No downsizing function, the decrypted files occupy too much storage space.
3. No custom settings to adjust bit rate, frame rate, etc.

[Kariudo]

If you have any idea of what you're doing....

1: isn't a problem. DGAVCIndex allows you to get the m2ts file into avisynth, which is really all you need
2: reducing the size = reducing the quality. Generally, you shouldn't trust a program to do anything besides its basic functions, and re-encoding a file is not a basic function of a ripper. If you really don't have the 25GB of space you need, you probably shouldn't be editing with HD in the first place. Hard drives are cheap.
3: I'm just gonna have to ask you to kinda leave the building now. Bitrate is related to my reply to #2, but telling people to change the frame rate is just plain wrong. If you don't do these things correctly, your video quality will be greatly reduced (and the only way to fix it is to re-rip your disks and do it correctly the second time)

If you don't know what you're talking about, you shouldn't be trying to give help

[mirkosp]

1: isn't a problem. DGAVCIndex allows you to get the m2ts file into avisynth, which is really all you need

Not if the m2ts contains VC-1 video, which is most likely to be the case for American and European Blu-rays.

Also, I did some more testing with ffmpegsource2 with m2ts, and the output was buggy as hell. First frame won't decode, seeking is off by x amount of frames, and when it manages to get the right frame it has odd decoding artifacts. DSS2 is still faster and more accurate and has no decoding bug whatsoever, so I'll keep suggesting that.

[Qyot27]

Part of the reason I did the MKV indexing script was for this purpose, since I got the Blu-ray of Eva 1.11 last Tuesday. For the record, that one uses H.264 (and some of the extras were ID'ed by DVD Fab as MPEG-2, although I didn't test). It was the Funimation R1 release, not the Japanese R2.

Rip the disc with DVD Fab HD Decrypter (which is the portion of the free download that actually says 'Free' instead of 'Demo' or 'Trial' or whatever the heck it was), remux from M2TS to MKV using either GDSMux or eac3to, and then index/open with AviSynth - FFMS2 shouldn't have any problems if you've remuxed to MKV first. The problems with Transport Streams are mentioned in the FFMS2 manual, and for TS, FFMS2 relies directly on Haali's Media Splitter being installed (if I remember correctly).

[Mister Hatt]

Just to point it out: FFMS2 can handle .m2ts perfectly fine with libavformat or Haali's splitter. The only time Haali's splitter is actually required is for MPEG2-TS streams, that is, transport streams recorded from Japanese ISDB-T and ISDB-S broadcasts over television. It is NOT a problem with bluray transports. The issue with loading the .m2ts directly is entirely unrelated to the splitter.

On a side note, DGAVCIndex is for AVC, DGVC1Index is for VC-1, however both are no longer distributed as they violate their own licenses. The new version is just DGNVIndex and it uses nvdec.dll to decode with nvidia GPU's. It handles AVC, VC-1, and MPEG2-PS, and if I recall some funky things it does you can get it to work with MPEG2-TS and WMV9 as well.