My bluray source is splitted in two .m2ts files, how can I handle this ?

[guista]

Hi all,

I want to produce a single MKV/x264/AC3 movie encoded with a 4000 KB/s bitrate from a VC-1 bluray so I first extracted the movie from the bluray.
The first thing I notice is it is encoded in VC-1 (rather than h264) and the movie is splitted in two 19 GB files => this is my problem.
The files are consecutive and named 00055.m2ts and 00056.m2ts

For reading/transcoding VC-1 to x264, I use multiAVCHD.
I dragged & dropped my two files to multiAVCHD in the movie chronological order (for a reason I do not know, MeGUI does not read VC-1 movies).
I chose a "2-pass fast" process from the "Properties" tab.
After clicking on the "Start" button, I plan to choose the "MKV/AVC" button to generate a MKV/x264 movie.

Doing so, I think I should get a single MKV/x264 movie merged from the 2 source files mentionned above.
Because I am not sure and do not want to lose hours of encoding, I prefer asking here before.

* So, is there something more specific to do with multiAVCHD for merging the files or is it implicitely doing it ?

Do not hesitate to tell if I post in the wrong section because I am not sure.

Thanks in advance for your help.

[setarip_old]

Hi!

A much simpler approach is to use ONLY (presently free) MakeMKV to, in "one click" decrypt, properly join, and convert to MKV (No other programs such as DVDFab Passkey or AnyDVDHD should be used or running)...

[guista]

Hi!

A much simpler approach is to use ONLY (presently free) MakeMKV to, in "one click" decrypt, properly join, and convert to MKV (No other programs such as DVDFab Passkey or AnyDVDHD should be used or running)...

Thanks for your help.
I will do this but I think I still need multiAVCHD for the VC-1 to x264 transcode task.
As I read on the forum, multiAVCHD seems to be the only encoding GUI which can read VC-1

[Inspector.Gadget]

As I read on the forum, multiAVCHD seems to be the only encoding GUI which can read VC-1

No. This is incorrect. What you want to do to transcode a multi-M2TS file to x264-and-original-audio-in-MKV file is the following:

1) Open a decryption layer such as AnyDVD HD on top of the Blu-ray or have the original Blu-ray structure, decrypted, on a hard drive.
2) Run eac3to against the Blu-ray structure and look for the longest playlist (the main movie). Extract the VC-1 video to MKV and the audio however you'd like.
3) Serve the VC-1-in-MKV file through Avisynth by means of DirectShowSource() or DSS2() using Haali's Splitter and the Microsoft WMVideo Decoder DMO. If you have Haali installed and you haven't set ffdshow to decode VC-1 the former is literally as simple as DirectShowSource("Somefile.mkv"). DSS2() will require you to copy AVSS.dll from the install directory of the Haali Media Splitter to your Avisynth plugins folder and is only necessary if you're doing cut/join operations in Avisynth.
4) Pass the AVS script to x264, either directly or by means of your favorite GUI. Pick mp4 or mkv output to ensure that MKVMergeGUI can automatically detect the frame rate of the video.
5) Mux the x264 output and the audio to your final Matroska file with MKVMergeGUI. Be sure to manually enter any value for audio delay that eac3to reports as un-fixable.

[setarip_old]

@Guista

Is there a specific reason that you need/want to convert the videostream from VC-1 to H.264 (x264 provides means to convert to H.264)?

[guista]

Thanks for your helpful explanations.


2) Run eac3to against the Blu-ray structure and look for the longest playlist (the main movie).

In facts, my two files have about the same size.
00055.m2ts is 19*943*MB and 00056.m2ts is 20*183 MB.
So I suppose I have to do your operations twice.

[guista]

@Guista

Is there a specific reason that you need/want to convert the videostream from VC-1 to H.264 (x264 provides means to convert to H.264)?

The first reason is I want to compress my video source file to save some room on my disk and want to play the movie on my multimedia box which can only read the MKV/x264/AC3 HD format with a 5000 KB/s max bit rate (otherwise, the result is choppy).

[Sharc]

You could also convert the VC-1 Blu-ray into a h.264 Blu-ray backup using BD-Rebuilder (it will handle VC-1 and the split files correctly), and then convert the new BD structure to mkv using MakeMKV - if you absolutely want it in mkv container.

[guista]

You could also convert the VC-1 Blu-ray into a h.264 Blu-ray backup using BD-Rebuilder (it will handle VC-1 and the split files correctly), and then convert the new BD structure to mkv using MakeMKV - if you absolutely want it in mkv container.

I did not know BD-Rebuilder (but I am a beginner so I have a limited knowledge about media encoding :p)
Yes, I need MKV because my box can only play MKV.
Thanks.

[iSeries]

How about using MakeMKV to create an mkv file of your movie, then using RipBot264? (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=127611).

[Inspector.Gadget]

In facts, my two files have about the same size.
00055.m2ts is 19*943*MB and 00056.m2ts is 20*183 MB.
So I suppose I have to do your operations twice.

No. Playlist files are MPLS, not M2TS. Since your main movie appears to be contained in both, running eac3to against the disc will indicate a playlist that corresponds to the runtime of the main movie and includes both of those M2TS files. When you run the demux operation against that playlist, eac3to will automatically join the video, audio, and subtitle streams as if your main movie consisted of one huge M2TS file.

[guista]

In facts, I found this : I double-clicked on the ffdshow system tray icon. The "Codec" section let me changed the "VC-1" codec which was defaultly set to "wmv9". I do not know if I have the "wmv9" codec installed on my computer because there is a while I did not use neither update Windows Media Player nor Windows XP at all.
So I changed it to "libavcodec" and now, all my tools (MPC, MeGUI ...) can read my VC-1 bluray correctly.
MeGUI was able to read my BD tracks separately but I do not know yet if it has a tool for joining them.

I started BD-Rebuilder this morning (set to transcode to x264). It is still working but I can tell for sure that both .m2ts tracks are encoded separately (for instance, the BD-Rebuilder logs does not talk about joining).

=> Just to be sure, can BD-Rebuilder simply and quickly join the two x264 generated files without reencoding everything ?

(in the past, I tried to join 2 XVid video tracks and VirtualDub began reencoding both files to join them and it took hours again ...).

[Sharc]

I started BD-Rebuilder this morning (set to transcode to x264). It is still working but I can tell for sure that both .m2ts tracks are encoded separately (for instance, the BD-Rebuilder logs does not talk about joining).

=> Just to be sure, can BD-Rebuilder simply and quickly join the two x264 generated files without reencoding everything ?

When a movie is split into several .m2ts, BD-Rebuilder will find these .m2ts automatically based on the playlist.
It will then re-encode VC-1 to h.264 (there is no way to get around the time consuming re-encoding when you want to convert the format from VC-1 to anything else.
If you want .mkv as container you need to select 'Mode=>Alternate Movie-Only Output', and then select one of the 'MKV Container...' items.

If you only want to put the original VC-1 in an .mkv container without applying compression or format conversion, you could just use MakeMKV.

[guista]

It will then re-encode VC-1 to h.264 (there is no way to get around the time consuming re-encoding when you want to convert the format from VC-1 to anything else.

Yes, of course, VC-1 to x264 need reencoding.
My question was just about joining the two videos together in order to make one single video file.

Once VC-1 to x264 conversion is completed and I get the two x264 files, does x264 merging only consist in copying the x264 video 2/2 at the end of the x264 video 1/2 or does it need some other long encoding operations ?

[Sharc]

^^^
When you selected a Blu-ray structure as output, the two m2ts files will not be merged, but the original structure will be maintained IIRC.
When you selected 'Mode=> Alternate-Movie Only Output' and then selected one of the MKV Containers, the two 264 files will be merged into one .mkv IIRC - but I am not 100% sure.
In any case the merging will take very little time, as it is more or less just a copy/append process.

[guista]

When you selected 'Mode=> Alternate-Movie Only Output' and then selected one of the MKV Containers, the two 264 files will be merged into one .mkv IIRC - but I am not 100% sure.

You are right. I finally got a 4575 GB / "00000.m2ts" file (in the BD stream dir) which is composed of a single h264 track (joined from the two initial split tracks) and an AC3 track (I will extract then put them in a MKV).

In any case the merging will take very little time, as it is more or less just a copy/append process.

The BD-Rebuilder log (BD-Rebuilder log (http://www.cijoint.fr/cj201011/cijeLn1RNq.jpg)) does not mention which tool is used for joining the two h264 tracks.
Anyway, by reading the encoding infos and times, I can deduce that the joining occurs in the final rebuild step which only last 6 minutes as you said.

Do you know the name of the tool which can join two h264 tracks ?

I prefer doing everything with MeGUI because it offers more settings than BD-Rebuilder and it seems that MeGUI does not have a MKV joining tool.

[Sharc]

Do you know the name of the tool which can join two h264 tracks ?

tsMuxeR (http://www.smlabs.net/tsmuxer_en.html)

[guista]

tsMuxeR (http://www.smlabs.net/tsmuxer_en.html)

I use tsMuxer every day to demux tracks but did not think of looking for a joining feature inside.

Update:
I just joined my original bluray tracks but I had to open the "00000.mpls" from the PLAYLIST directory with tsMuxeR.
Opening the "00000.mpls" file automatically opened "00055.mts" and "00056.mts" and displayed them as a single tracks in tsMuxeR.
I muxed and finally obtained the joined video.

Thanks for your help.