Just a General Question About Handbrake and Blu-Ray Encoding

[Maverickmusic]

I am contemplating making the investment in buying a Blu drive but before I do I want to ask some general questions...

I have a 500GB 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac.

In order to rip my Blu Rays, I would need MakeMKV to rip the media from disc and then feed it into Handbrake to create a file that could be Apple compatible correct?

Okay so how big, typically, is a rip from MakeMKV? Once that file is fed into Handbrake, what is the size of that newly encoded file? How long does this process take?

[JohnAStebbins]

I am contemplating making the investment in buying a Blu drive but before I do I want to ask some general questions...

I have a 500GB 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac.

In order to rip my Blu Rays, I would need MakeMKV to rip the media from disc and then feed it into Handbrake to create a file that could be Apple compatible correct?

That's one way it can be done. There are other rippers. I use AnyDVD in a windows VM.

Okay so how big, typically, is a rip from MakeMKV? Once that file is fed into Handbrake, what is the size of that newly encoded file? How long does this process take?

An uncompressed BD movie is typically 20-40GB, but can be larger. The entire disc is 50GB. The duration to rip depends on your drive, but is typically 40min to 1hr for an unmodified drive. BD drives are all RipLock'ed. There are firmware hacks that can remove this and get ripping time down to around 20min. After ripping, transcoding with handbrake will probably take 6 to 10 hours on your hardware (depending on the settings you use).

[Deleted User 11865]

Okay so how big, typically, is a rip from MakeMKV?

If you only rip the main feature, something like 25 GB. Note that since MakeMKV rips each title individually, if you rip all titles at once it may exceed 50 GB.

Once that file is fed into Handbrake, what is the size of that newly encoded file?

Depends on your settings. Some sources may end up as small as 2.5 GB, some will require a lot more to achieve good quality. Most movies will probably never exceed 10 GB.

How long does this process take?

Depends on your settings. But with a 2 GHz C2D, even with the fastest possible settings, the best you'll get will be real time or a bit slower. With typical settings, probably a good 10 hours per movie, like j45 said.

Also, dealing with subtitles can be a PITA, since HandBrake doesn't support Blu-Ray subtitles yet. You will have to extract them from the MKV, and either:

1. convert them to DVD subtitles, create a new MKV with the video, audio and converted subtitles, then open that with HandBrake
2. OCR them to SRT subtitles and add them via HandBrake's subtitle tab

It might be easier to just download the appropriate SRT from the web.

[nightstrm]

An uncompressed BD movie is typically 20-40GB, but can be larger. The entire disc is 50GB. The duration to rip depends on your drive, but is typically 40min to 1hr for an unmodified drive. BD drives are all RipLock'ed. There are firmware hacks that can remove this and get ripping time down to around 20min. After ripping, transcoding with handbrake will probably take 6 to 10 hours on your hardware (depending on the settings you use).

I'd never thought to look for a hacked firmware to get around this... a couple minutes searching Google and my LG GGC-H20L now has a patched version of its firmware. Thanks!

[JeffElkins]

Excellent thread. I'm in a similar position as the OP, but ripping/encoding under linux, playing on mac mini, acer revo or linux. Regarding makemkv is any advantage gained from using makemkv vs using a m2ts as the source file?

[Maverickmusic]

Thanks for the responses!

[TedJ]

Regarding makemkv is any advantage gained from using makemkv vs using a m2ts as the source file?

Ripping to MKV preserves chapters and audio track metadata, as well as seamlessly joins features spread across multiple m2ts files. When ripping, be sure to discard any unneeded subtitle tracks as Handbrake can't read them and having more than 16 subtitle tracks will cause ffmpeg to fail opening it.

[JeffElkins]

Thanks! I'm clear on that now.

[mkelley]

An uncompressed BD movie is typically 20-40GB, but can be larger. The entire disc is 50GB. The duration to rip depends on your drive, but is typically 40min to 1hr for an unmodified drive. BD drives are all RipLock'ed. There are firmware hacks that can remove this and get ripping time down to around 20min. After ripping, transcoding with handbrake will probably take 6 to 10 hours on your hardware (depending on the settings you use).

I'd never thought to look for a hacked firmware to get around this... a couple minutes searching Google and my LG GGC-H20L now has a patched version of its firmware. Thanks!

Sorry to intrude (I know this is the Mac forum so just shoo me away if I shouldn't be here) but is this true of a PC blu-ray drive as well?

I hadn't noticed my blu-ray rips taking a terribly long time, but about 25-40 minutes is about an average. Is the drive RipLocked on PC blu-ray drives, or is this strictly a Mac thing?

[JohnAStebbins]

An uncompressed BD movie is typically 20-40GB, but can be larger. The entire disc is 50GB. The duration to rip depends on your drive, but is typically 40min to 1hr for an unmodified drive. BD drives are all RipLock'ed. There are firmware hacks that can remove this and get ripping time down to around 20min. After ripping, transcoding with handbrake will probably take 6 to 10 hours on your hardware (depending on the settings you use).

I'd never thought to look for a hacked firmware to get around this... a couple minutes searching Google and my LG GGC-H20L now has a patched version of its firmware. Thanks!

Sorry to intrude (I know this is the Mac forum so just shoo me away if I shouldn't be here) but is this true of a PC blu-ray drive as well?

I hadn't noticed my blu-ray rips taking a terribly long time, but about 25-40 minutes is about an average. Is the drive RipLocked on PC blu-ray drives, or is this strictly a Mac thing?

All BD drives that I know of. Certainly was the case for both the LG and Lite-On drives that I have.

[Deleted User 11865]

Sorry to intrude (I know this is the Mac forum so just shoo me away if I shouldn't be here) but is this true of a PC blu-ray drive as well?

I hadn't noticed my blu-ray rips taking a terribly long time, but about 25-40 minutes is about an average. Is the drive RipLocked on PC blu-ray drives, or is this strictly a Mac thing?

A Mac Blu-Ray drive? AFAIK, all Blu-Ray drives available on the market today are "made for" PCs, and happen to work to some extent under other OSes.

[mkelley]

Ah, I see -- a quick search revealed that my drive (Lite-On) doesn't have RipLock, which is why I'm guessing my rip speeds are so fast (I just timed a blu-ray rip of Red and it did it in 15 minutes, which ain't half bad).

I was just wondering -- thanks for indulging my curiosity.

[Maverickmusic]

being the dork that I am, I used MakeMKV to backup the entire movie and am now sending that file into handbrake but is taking forever to load, is this normal?

[mkelley]

The file or the folder? Handbrake reads the blu-ray folder very quickly (at least compared to the time it used to take to read the blu-ray M2TS file). If you are pointing it towards an M2TS file it will be slow but not *incredibly* slow (but you shouldn't do this, as some blu-ray structures use multiple M2TS files and without examining it you can't tell which is which -- it ain't always only just the biggest file. Far better to use Handbrake to point at the blu-ray file structure).

[rmharman]

Hopefully resurrecting an old topic is not considered bad form?

I saw somebody remark here that they had a BluRay drive that did NOT come with RipLock. I'm wondering what model that is? Or if there's general guidance on a preferred model of DVD/BluRay drive (either with write functionality or not), for use with MacOS. I'm on Sierra. Have already installed Handbrake, and used homebrew to get the libdvdcss in place for DVDs. But I need an external drive to go with the software. Figured I'd ask around, see if anyone has something that works well.

[Woodstock]

Lots of USB DVD drives that don't have riplock. Without a Bluray ripping tool, a BD drive won't be useful to you (libdvdcss does NOTHING for BD).

That said, I've used LG USB2 BD readers with MakeMKV, and the speed limitation was in how fast MakeMKV could write to the destination, not how fast it could rip. But you have to make sure it has full power available to it - it takes TWO powered USB2 ports to run at top speed.

[Ronin]

Speed is limited to how fast your machine is, the OP has a Core 2 Duo which is no where near as fast as today's i7 are, then there is the issue of how fast the Blu-ray drive is. The factory will offer a claim that its capable of 2x or 4x or more (so it could transfer data a lot faster) however Riplock is still with us and even now, there is a lot of confusing as to which player/burners actually have Riplock. Riplock is a method to slow down a disc's playback when the disc contents is detected to be a movie), the player manufacturers claim that this is enabled to keep the drive spinning slowly to keep the nose levels down (high speed drives are very noisy) but its commonly believed that the secret reason is to annoy users who are doing anything but watching a movie in real time. Either way, Riplock really does slow down the process massively, making it a near real time process. Handbrake on a model CPU like a quad core i7 can process an entire movie at a rate that is several times faster than real time, so the conclusion is that today the lowest link in the chain is the Riplocked blu-ray drive. Next would be the processor speed (more GHz is better) then more cores.

There used to be a site that offered firmware to remote the speed limitation of Riplock so you now have to search for a drive that has no Riplock or that can have it disabled easily. Manufacturers do not call this feature Riplock, that's actually the Internet's term for it, the manufacturer might call it quiet-operation, or not even refer to it at all. Many users confuse Riplock and "quiet mode", the both refer to the same effect.

Riplock does not engage if the player's firnware does not detect that the disc is a movie disc (i.e. if a data disc is detected) which then allows the player to spin the disc at its full potential.

Some folks claim that LG drives do not have Riplock enabled on them but other owners claim that their LG cannot exceed 2X or 4X. It seems logical to buy a drive from a reputable vendor that will accept a return if your own testing shows that that the drive cannot exceed 4X. (Riplock commonly allows the drive to go faster than 1X on playback, as much as 2X or 4X, so that the buffers can get filled up, then the drive spins down to zero while it waits for the buffers to empty).

Blu-ray discs can typically have 25 to 50 GB of data on them, DVDs will common have 4 to 7 Gb of data on them so the leap to Blu-ray means that you have much more data to move into your computer before it gets processed, so its important to maximize the transfer speed as much as is possible.