Converting blu ray files to mkv

[jamesj84]

First of all, a BIG hello to all and after following the forum for a while thought it be about time i join.

I have been over the years converting all my currently owned DVDs mainly to unclutter my living room. I have been buying blu rays too and have started doing the same thing.

I use anydvd to rip the movie to the disc as movie only. And i use HD convert to X to produce my MKV files, sometimes a like for like dependant on movie. I also have MakeMKV whic is brilliant for making a like for like audio and video if you like in the playable container. HD convert to X and ripbot264 take so long to produce a uncompressed MKV file from the BD where as makeMKV does it in 25 mins. IS this my settings?

Also if i use HD convert to X to convert the uncompressed mkv back to blu ray files should it still be a like for like as the original or will it loose quality in doing so?

Cheers guys. Its not such a major question but never the less im still in the learning stages of getting the best out of my current collection and to a good quality and saving space where i can if the movie i feel does not need the best quality in sound or video.

[hello_hello]

I use anydvd to rip the movie to the disc as movie only. And i use HD convert to X to produce my MKV files, sometimes a like for like dependant on movie. I also have MakeMKV whic is brilliant for making a like for like audio and video if you like in the playable container. HD convert to X and ripbot264 take so long to produce a uncompressed MKV file from the BD where as makeMKV does it in 25 mins. IS this my settings?

I can't speak for HDConvertToX or Ripbot as I've never used them for extracting the original video to MKV (the original video is compressed, by the way), but I generally bypass one of your steps. Instead of using AnyDVD to rip the movie to the hard drive and then extract the streams, I just have AnyDVD decrypting in the background. I then use MeGUI's HD Streams Extractor to extract the appropriate streams directly from the discs and save them as MKV. That way you're basically ripping and extracting at the same time.
Whether HDConvertToX or Ripbot will do the same thing, I'm not sure, but I am fairly sure the HD Streams Extractor is available as a standalone application. http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=141829&highlight=Streams+Extractor

Also if i use HD convert to X to convert the uncompressed mkv back to blu ray files should it still be a like for like as the original or will it loose quality in doing so?

If you mean when you extract the original video/audio to an MKV will the quality be the same, then yes, because you're simply copying the video/audio, not re-encoding it. Well I assume you're not re-encoding it, but maybe that's why HDConvertToX and Ripbot take so long. Maybe they're not remuxing/copying the original streams into a new MKV, maybe they're re-encoding too.

You always lose quality when re-encoding... in theory. Whether it's a perceivable quality loss is another story.
Unless you're concerned about hitting a target file size then single pass, CRF encoding is the way to go, as rather than control the file size you control the quality. A CRF value of 18 is supposed to be "transparent" although some people believe it's a little lower (around 16). The higher the CRF value the lower the quality and the smaller the file size. In my opinion, you can get away with a CRF value of 20 for HD video and still not see any real quality loss, but everyone's ideal quality setting is different.
And CRF encoding is much faster than 2 pass encoding.

[jamesj84]

Hmmm thanks for the reply. And i totaly understand. I know the Blu ray disc is compressed, if it was not compressed then the actual file sizes would be gigantic. When i mean a uncompressed MKV file, i mean it to be as keeping the compression ratio the same from the blu ray disc so like a 1:1 copy just a different container and no decoding.

WHat is an ideal CRF value for best quality when encoding

[CWR03]

When i mean a uncompressed MKV file, i mean it to be as keeping the compression ratio the same from the blu ray disc so like a 1:1 copy just a different container and no decoding.
The file you get from MakeMKV is just that.

WHat is an ideal CRF value for best quality when encoding
There is no "ideal" setting. It's what fits your needs; quality vs. compression. I use CRF 22 and I'm satisfied with the quality I get with being able to fit over 1,000 movies on a 2TB hard drive.

[hello_hello]

WHat is an ideal CRF value for best quality when encoding

Between 18 and 22 would probably be "typical", but I'd run a few test encodes to see what you're happy with.
Personally I use 19 for DVDs and 20 for 720p.

[Chetwood]

Unless you're concerned about hitting a target file size then single pass, CRF encoding is the way to go, as rather than control the file size you control the quality. A CRF value of 18 is supposed to be "transparent" although some people believe it's a little lower (around 16). The higher the CRF value the lower the quality and the smaller the file size.
I've finally about to read up on this rather than having AutoGK output certain filesizes for me. Is there a tool to determine CRF from any source (DVD/BluRay) so I would use this as the target quality in Staxrip or Handbrake (haven't decided which tool to use yet)?

[hello_hello]

Do you mean to determine which CRF value to use when encoding? I'm not sure I understand the question.
If that's what you mean, the way I understand it the quality is relative to the original, so all else being equal a given CRF value should give you the same relative quality for every encode.

[Chetwood]

I mean, is there a way to determin the CRF value of the original so when I'm encoding I simply need to use the same setting to achieve the same quality (getting smaller files as a result of the encoding)?

[Groucho2004]

I mean, is there a way to determin the CRF value of the original so when I'm encoding I simply need to use the same setting to achieve the same quality (getting smaller files as a result of the encoding)?

A video stream does not "have" a CRF value. It's not a property like the average bitrate.
In order to achieve the same quality as the source you'll have to encode losslessly which results in a much larger file than the original. Or don't encode at all. :D

[hello_hello]

I mean, is there a way to determin the CRF value of the original so when I'm encoding I simply need to use the same setting to achieve the same quality (getting smaller files as a result of the encoding)?

You don't need to. The way I understand it is a CRF value of around 18 is considered "transparent" (or maybe 16 depending on who you ask) regardless of the quality of the original.
So if you want to achieve the same quality as the original you'd use a CRF value of about 18 every time. Anything below CRF 16-18 would increase the file sizes substantially while probably not offering a perceivable difference in quality.
Whether you end up with a smaller file size than the original depends on how efficiently it was compressed and how hard it is to re-compress, although given you're generally converting a video which was compressed much less efficiently than x264 can do, the file size should reduce.

Don't think of CRF in terms of the quality of the original video, but of the quality of the encode relative to the quality of the original video. CRF 18 will always be transparent, CRF 19 will always be virtually transparent, CRF 20 will always be just a little less transparent the CRF 19, etc, etc. my descriptions... but only for the sake of making a point.

[Chetwood]

Yeah, I thought CRF would be similar to Bits/(Pixel*Frame) but of course it isn't so thanks for clearing that up.

I'm still trying to determine whether to use xvid or x.264 for SD encodes of my own ripped DVDs now that all players in the house can do both. I've read up on Staxrip anamorphic encoding but I'm still wondering how to translate the CRF value into the Bits/(Pixel*Frame) Mediainfo reports on some scene releases. TV shows are cropped to 624x352 encoded with Advanced Simple@L5, probably to keep filesize down. I however wanna keep max resolution so when ripping my PAL DVDs I'm gonna stick to 720x max fit to mod16. But when I use this profile, I don't know what to set the target quantizer to. Any suggestions? Thanks.

[hello_hello]

You may want to check your standalone players support anamorphic MKVs. A lot of them don't. There's a few standalone devices in this house (Bluray players and TVs with built in media players) which will play MKVs but only the Sony bluray player displays anamorphic MKVs correctly (and the PCs of course). The rest just assume square pixels.

I don't think there's any direct relationship between Bits/(Pixel*Frame) and CRF value. To me Bits/(Pixel*Frame) has always seemed fairly meaningless in terms of quality. I just checked a few of my own encodes and of the ones with the same resolution (1280x544) they ranged between 0.113 and 0.211 yet they were all encoded using a CRF value of 20. The bitrates ranged from 1891kbps to 3515kbps. I guess the harder a video is to compress the higher the Bits/(Pixel*Frame) and the higher the bitrate for a given quality.

For encoding AVIs I still use AutoGK (which uses the Advanced Simple@L5 profile) with the standard h263 matrix. AutoGK's default quality setting for single pass encoding (75%) uses a target quantizer of 2.67. You can check it by opening the Xvid encoder configuration while AutoGK is running a single pass encode. A target quantizer of 2.00 (100% for AutoGK) is the maximum quality for Xvid. Visually though, you'd probably have to go through each encode frame by frame to see any difference. If I'm running a 2 pass encode using AutoGK I still try to aim for about 75% after the first pass, but I must admit it does get tedious having to sometimes run the compression test a few times while adjusting the file size to get it right, especially if you've set a fixed width.

If all the players in your house play high definition video then there's no reason to resize down to a width of 720. You could resize up to 1024x576 square pixels instead etc, but once again you're probably better off using x264 than Xvid if you want to keep the file sizes down.

Staxrip and I never quite seemed to get along, but I do like MeGUI, especially for x264 encoding. For AVIs I still use AutoGK as when it comes to encoding DVDs it rarely gets anything wrong, plus I've got the process for using it to encode file types it doesn't natively support fairly well refined (MKVs and MP4s etc).