[-F69-] A/V Club

[p00p]

I've RL leveled (Ding!) to some fun new hardware and am able to explore more of the A/V nerd in me and want to share.

I was talking to Jason at the New Years Party and we started nerding out a little over Blu-rays and such. I figure this is a worthy subject for it's own thread.

Post your audio and visual fun-ness here. Like, particularly awesome sounding or visually stimulating games or movies or music or related programs and such.

[p00p]

-This is possibly TLDR material.. I just feel like nerding out some-

MakeMKV

^ A cross-platform Blu-Ray ripping tool that's free in Beta atm. It throws the uncompressed video and audio into an .mkv wrapper (think of it as a payable uncompressed .rar) -that you can play through VLC or using the right matroska codecs for WMP. It supports TrueHD and DTS-HD audio in the latest release!

I've stopped stealing movies.. -working on the other things. But I have started my own kind of 'Time Shifting' with my Netflix Movies. I tend to keep the discs for a week or two until I can watch them and then I find I have more time to watch but have to wait the two days to get a new movie.. so, I'm ripping some and watching them later. ... And what's the point in using a method that loses the fidelity of the A/V, right? So it's either AnyDVD HD or MakeMKV to my current knowledge.

It makes huge files 20-30+GB each so that, in itself, will help me force their deletion soon after watching. If i start to hold on to them I'll prolly just have the files deleted automatically after a month or so for space and my fledgling morals that I'm working on finding again.

I think this is more convenient than AnyDVD HD because AnyDVD rips the disk image, including all the titles and dvd menues resulting in an even bigger footprint. Makemkv lets you choose the titles you rip so you can just unclick any previews or special content from being ripped. ..or you can rip them, watch them and delete since they're created as their own mkv file from the disc. It burns at roughly 2x on my player.

I just now am getting the hardware to handle TrueHD and DTS-HD audio passthrough so I'll be testing that out through VLC player soon. .. my neighbors will hate me. -but I've always tried to be a conscientious neighbor and keep it down when they're home of course-

There are some problems that remain with the x64 Windows Media Player (x64 Media Center) where there aren't correctly working codecs for MKV yet. But neither WMP nor x64 WMP support bit-passthrough audio. So far it's just VLC, PowerDVD9 and possibly WinDVD 2010.

Other news; Has anyone played L4D 2 with 5.1 sound? It's incredibly awesome sounding! It envelopes very very well. Even better than l4d.

[Titahn]

I too have been doing the "Time Shifting"-thing with my Netflix movies. We just got our blu-ray drive for the HTPC, and have needed a way to continue holding on to movies to watch at a more convenient time. I have been using DVDFab - just their free version - to turn blu-rays into ISOs, which I just mount on a virtual drive and watch. In DVDFab you can copy the entire disc (menus and all), or movie only. I will give MakeMKV a try, but need to wait for the new hard drive to arrive (as p00p said, copying BDs take up A LOT of space).

[p00p]

ah ha! That's the program you mentioned. For some reason I had it in my head that it was AnyDVD. I'll check it out.

[bl00k]

They were giving away Xilisoft DVD Ripper Ultimate 5 for free so I grabbed it. I've only tried one movie rip so far. The sound didn't stay sync'd. I'll try it out again, but so far i'm not too impressed.

[b0lg]

L4D2 in 5.1 is FTW, I have a 5.1 setup in my home office but rarely get to play without head phones do the the wife aggro....

I almost made a post like this a few weeks ago, hols and her girls need a new video format for their HD TV clips and wanted some feed back. But they got side tracked and decided to wait awhile longer.

I use anydvd to make the iso. The russians made the matroska container and they did great. It's a few years old already, 2002/2003 but is picking up in popularity due to its new friends Samsung and LG! I have been doing h.246/mp4 for awhile now but plan to go with matroska for bluray. Star Trek bluray was 45GB dropped down to 5GB compressed at full resolution.

[Titahn]

When I rip movies, I want zero loss in quality, in sound and video. So my movies take up a lot of space because there is no compression going on. My brain likes to think that any sort of compression equals some sort of loss in quality, even if it's minuscule. I'm sure I'm wrong in this. Is there any compression format out there that does not lose ANY quality from video and audio?

[b0lg]

@titahn, yea the mp4's that makemkv pulls off the bluray are compressed version of the raw video shot with the camera. So we are basically taking a compressed image and compressing it again or differently, which is why we get the quality loss. The only way to keep the quality is to drop the resolution to fit your viewing screen, say iphone or laptop and not the big TV, or get your hands on the raw video and play with different encoders Maybe in a year or two there will be a better encoder than Mpeg 4 version 14 (H.264)

I used makemkv on the iso's I already had. Took a whole 10min to copy off the disk! That is a lot faster than anydvd did. Makemkv just copied the H.264 MP4 off the bluray ~35GB and the Mpeg2 off a dvd ~6GB granted they had the mkv container. I ran the MP4 through handbrake using the max setting just to see what happened, it took 2hr's and I could see lose of quality on the darker shots. and it was only 5GB smaller.

[b0lg]

handbrake drops Divx and XVID

I love handbrake on the mac, works fast and easy. It has been on pc for awhile now but I already have my tools of choice there.

[Grimmie]

Been having a little fun with my laptop and my Ps3.. I can share certain things I download and store in my video folder and watch them on my Ps3. Since I have my Ps3 hooked up to my surround sound and such I can download oh say Gamer and store it in affore mentioned folder then just access it and crank the volume and enjoy!!

This may not be new to anyone else but I though it kicked ass and have been having fun with it!!

[Titahn]

Has anyone heard of, or had any experience with Ripbot264?

[Mathazar]

So I aquired the p90x video's for marji but they are in .mpg format that won't play from the usb port on my DVD player. I could just burn all of them to DVD's (I have the ISO's too for now) but I'd rather rip them all to dvix/xvid. Anyone have a recommendation for how to do that best? Handbrake doesn't come with a xvid codec and so I'm hoping someone has an easy answer for me so I barely have to work at all.

[p00p]

Mar 5, 2010 7:37:23 GMT -7 Mathazar said:

So I aquired the p90x video's for marji but they are in .mpg format that won't play from the usb port on my DVD player. I could just burn all of them to DVD's (I have the ISO's too for now) but I'd rather rip them all to dvix/xvid. Anyone have a recommendation for how to do that best? Handbrake doesn't come with a xvid codec and so I'm hoping someone has an easy answer for me so I barely have to work at all.

Checkout Xilisoft Video Converter Ultimate 5.1.26, it converts pretty much anything to/from anything. I hear it's in some software directory.