Just got a Blu-Ray drive, everything is borked

[Katie Boundary]

Yes, I realize I'm 14 years late to the party, but I just got my first Blu-Ray drive as a belated birthday present and I'd like to start ripping and converting the two Blu-Rays that I have (Bumblebee and Tron Legacy). Or at least watch them. But I'm having two problems so far.

The first is that neither VLC nor MPC can make heads or tails of my Blu-Rays. One of them, on one movie, was kind enough to say something about AACS, so I downloaded the key and the .dll and put them in the right places on my hard drive and now all four possible combinations of player and disc tell me "I can't open that, I don't know what went wrong, go f**k yourself"

So, any help with that would be lovely. But it's not necessary, as long as I can rip... right?

So, I'd like to be pointed in the direction of a free, no-bullshit tool that just copies the m2ts files from the disc to a hard drive without touching them (except possibly splitting and joining). Something like Smartripper or DVD Decrypter, but for Blu-rays. I do not need to clone the whole disc, nor do I need a single tool that does both ripping and recompressing. The forums do have a guide, but it seems to be from 2008 and is focused on whole-movie or whole-disc backup rather than on getting files to import into AVIsynth.

[videoh]

MakeMKV backup to folder. Enable it to decrypt while copying. Then you can play the folder with various players or access the streams for Avisynth.

I just know I'm your favorite geek.

[Katie Boundary]

Thanks, I'll try that :)

I've also found the thread on getting Blu-rays to play with "libre" software. After following all of those steps, I'm happy to report that Tron Legacy is playable, though Bumblebee is not.

[videoh]

When you are happy, I am happy.

[Katie Boundary]

Well, my first attempt at doing anything productive with MakeMKV resulted in an indiscriminate, but successful, data dump of EVERYTHING from the disc to an external hard drive, without repacking into a new container format. A bit messy but definitely usable.

Edit: and it looks like the m2ts files can be ported straight into AVIsynth using ffmpegsource2 (though the audio and video require separate imports), cutting out the need for DGindex. VERY nice! Everything works smoothly and I have a shiny new XviD AVI file made from one of the featurettes on the Bumblebee Blu-ray.

Edit 2: Featurettes work fine. Movies themselves still require a separate indexing step performed by ffmsindex.exe; otherwise, the program you're trying to open the video with will stop responding. If ffmsindex is run directly, it opens for 1/10th of a second and then quits, but right-clicking on the m2ts file and selecting "open with..." will make it behave. And that's good for video. Audio is still thwarting me because ffaudiosource wants to overwrite the index file and then we're back to Virtualdub crashing.

Edit 3: Workaround found. I can use TSmuxer to extract the audio to an ac3 file, then import that ac3 file into avisynth using nicac3source().

[videoh]

You can rip with MakeMKV directly to an MKV if you prefer it that way. Look at tutorials found on youtube.

Very few disks are MPEG2 so DGIndex would most likely not be usable anyway.

[qyot27]

Bumblebee has Bus Encryption enabled on the disc, which is actually not that common on standard Blu-ray. Having just the VUK or Unit Keys is not sufficient to play it back; a Host Certificate that hasn't been revoked by the drive is also necessary, although if using the patched libaacs (https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=176924)* that also caches the RDK, the non-revoked Host cert is only needed the first time the disc is played back in that drive.

*relevant notes from said post:
About RDK:

Discs that have BEE (all UHD and <10% of BD) and are played on a BEC drive (i.e. all recent drives) require a valid Host Cert to be present in KEYDB.CFG in order to calculate the RDK. Once the current Host Cert is revoked by the drive, the previously cached RDK can still used instead
The RDK, drive and disc specific, is saved in %APPDATA%\aacs\rdk\[DriveID]\[DiscID]. The [DriveID] is a hash of the Drive Cert which is assumed to be unique
It seems possible that some BEC drive would calculate a different RDK each time the same BEE disc is played. In this case, caching the RDK will obviously not work. No such drives are known at this time.

ffmsindex is a CLI program, invoke it from an open Command Prompt. All you have to do to get audio indexed at the same time is:
ffmsindex -t -1 file

[Katie Boundary]

You can rip with MakeMKV directly to an MKV if you prefer it that way.

I hate Matroska so it's very unlikely that I'd prefer it that way :) What would be most helpful at this point would be a more frame-accurate way of importing the video into AVIsynth, since ffmpegsource has frame-accuracy issues. My current workaround consumes a lot of drive space and is only good for short clips.

Bumblebee has Bus Encryption enabled on the disc, which is actually not that common on standard Blu-ray.

That's not surprising. The DVD versions of Transformers 2&3 used a combination of hard-links tricks and what looked like seamless branching to defeat certain rippers, and Transformers 4 had an undesirable audio track (sort of like a commentary) that would be set as the default track if you didn't pay close attention during ripping. Neither of those is very common on standard DVDs. I don't think they did anything special for #5; they probably figured that pirates would want to rip from the Blu-ray rather than the DVD.

But anyway, I now have 32.2 gigs of "bumblebee.m2ts" on the largest of my external hard drives so I'll never need to worry about bus encryption again :)

[Groucho2004]

You are such a fine ladyI think she claims to be a raptor.

[Katie Boundary]

There is DGDecNV is you have a decent nVidia card. You are such a fine lady that I would be happy to send you a free license.

While I did recently get a new Nvidia card, that use for it won't be necessary. A little bit more fooling around with MakeMKV has revealed that the program can perform a direct stream copy from the m2ts files to MKV files, keeping the original compression, and ffmpegsource2 has better frame-accuracy when importing an MKV instead of an m2ts file. That's a pretty important detail; enough to make me put my Matroskaphobia aside.

I think she claims to be a raptor.

All the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are female.

[Ghitulescu]

Now I think it's clear to everybody why God isn't married.

[Emulgator]

Love those KT threads ;-)