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Mkv to mp4/m4v lossless
- Thread starter Spacecowboy1
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How long does it take you to transcode a bluray and what's the overall quality like?
A LOT. I'd say at least 3-4 hours for a 1.5-2-hour-movie on a recent desktop config, assuming you use the High profile and not the worse-quality but considerably faster Normal.
Is there any reason I should choose high profile over the aTV3 preset? Sorry for all the questions !
Quality is excellent with the aTV3 preset. It may be a smudge softer but you have to really be looking for it to notice it. Encode times are enormous using the aTV3 preset but it is designed to give the highest quality at the smallest file size with transcoding time being...well whatever it takes. But is hard to predict because it is so CPU depended. Per my profile I have an older duo core and it can take 9-11hrs. I have gone 24 hours with the LOTR extended edition both discs combined into a single file. I do 1 BR at a time, overnight.
im not too bothered about file sizes to be honest...what i'm more worried about is encoding 100's of BR and regretting not doing them lossless(excluding audio) i can always go down(in size) but never back up, plus its a hell of a lot quicker and cpu labour intensive remuxing to a m4v container.
I save all of the mkv' of the things I really care about, in case I want to go back or a jailbreak or something happens that I can use them directly instead of the mp4's. Frankly, most stuff is watch once never go back to it, so an mp4 works fine for that stuff. I have a 2TB drive with both the mkv's/iso's in a folder, the rest of it is devoted to mp4's. When it get's filled, I just go through and week out some of the stuff I really don't want anymore (both mp4's and mkvs). When it gets to a point I can't bear to part with any files, I'll get another drive to archive the mkv's to.
Yes, that a really good idea obviously it will cost me on space but like I said its a compromise I'm willing to take....I have a lot of walt disney cartoons for my daughter and they look great transcoded....but for the movies that I love I want to retain as much quality as possible, so I think your way of thinking is spot on... I sold my JB aTV2 to fund paying for two aTV3 and am starting to think its more hassle than its worth....I hope they crack the 3 soon(if ever)so I can start playing mkv's again it's so much easier! I've even thought about going back to the wdtv but the interface is so clunky compared to the Atv
I've just installed the nightly build of handbrake which supports Pgs subs and transcoded a chunk of city of god and it works a treat and the qualitys not too shabby on the atv3 preset.
Yup, it's pretty nice. I've even published a full writeup on using it, the caveats etc. Here is a slightly edited version (removed the links back to my previous BD-specific articles in order not to promote them):
This is how you can easily burn in your Blu-ray subtitles to your videos
As I've explained in some of my previous, Blu-ray-specific articles, I prefer ripping my own Blu-ray (BD) discs to purchasing any movie from Apple's iTunes store because:
- (after ripping,) the lack of any copy protection aka DRM: I hate not being able to play the videos I paid for in a third-party and, in several cases, much-superior-to-the-stock-Videos-app player. See for example the excellent, and, in many circumstances (too bright or noisy environment (e.g., a gym) where the maximal brightness and/or volume of the device just wouldn't suffice), compulsory DSP's in It's Playing.
- with the majority iTunes Store titles, the lack of any subtitles / closed captions (a must for a non-native English speaker like me to understand everything). For example: none of the Monty Python (a true favorite of mine) movies / MPFC episodes, including related series like Fawlty Towers, have any kind of a CC.
- the inferior video (see THIS) and audio (even AC3, let alone DTS is vastly superior to Apple's AAC and the additional, even higher-quality audio tracks on some BD discs are even better) quality.
Yesterday evening, I had a long discussion over at MacRumors on preserving / converting subtitles (dedicated thread). During this, I've thoroughly tested SubRip's BD subtitle recognition capabilities and was truly underwhelmed. In the update (see the one dated at 10/03/2012) of my previous, BD subtitle-dedicated article, I've explained why it can't be reliably used for any serious BD recognition, not even if you export DVD-like, resized VobSub subtitle files.
I've also thoroughly tested the BD subtitle conversion features of HandBrake, the best all-around reencoding tool if you need H.264 footage in an MP4 or MKV container.
As HandBrake (HB) doesn't support simple remuxing (very fast conversion without recompressing the video track), you may still not want to use it for BD subtitle preserving, particularly not if:
- you target an iOS platform (not the Apple TV, which can't render bitmap subtitles at all) with players capable of rendering graphical (bitmap) subtitles (currently, there is only one player in the AppStore, ProPlayer, with both VobSub and hardware playback support), or
- you have the time for OCR'ing in Subler and, later, fixing the recognition errors with a subtitle editor like Jubler
- you need to be able to choose between more than one subtitle streams
- you hate burned-in subtitles (ones that you can't remove from the video)
- the video stream doesn't need to be reencoded because it's already in H.264 and not in VC-1 and it doesn't take up much storage and/or you don't mind the storage requirements.
If you can't render bitmap subtitles and don't want to play with OCR'ing and can put up with the disadvantages of burned-in subtitles (one language only and the inability to remove them), using HandBrake's relatively new BD subtitle support may be highly beneficial for you. In a nutshell: it allows for something not very easily (if at all) done using the traditional approach: burning in one of the subtitle track's content to the output video.
Being a relatively new feature, it still hasn't been debuted in the official version (as of now, 0.9.8) of HB and is only available in the current nightly builds. Fortunately, it's very easy to install the nightly build as it's available as a binary - as opposed to, say, AviDemux 2.6 for the Mac, which requires a multistep procedure.
Installation
Navigate to https://build.handbrake.fr/ and select the version corresponding to your operating system (Mac or Windows are regularly published). Then, just install it.
Using
When you load a direct BD rip MKV file, navigate to the Subtitles tab and click the drop-down list showing None in the first, Track column of the table on the bottom half, you'll see the original BD subtitle tracks listed under Foreign Audio Search (Bitmap). In the following screenshot (made of the direct BD rip of Iron Sky), there are three of them (Finnish, English, Swedish):
(click for a larger image)
Just select the one you want to burn in. You don't need to enable the Burned In checkbox.
Warning!
There are some caveats with HB's approach.
1, the output file will not have standard subtitle tracks, not even if you select more than one input BD subtracks, as opposed to the traditional approach of converting the BD subtrack(s) with BDSup2Sub and muxing the resulting VobSub-formatted (bitmap) tracks back to the MKV / MP4. The latter will be true, separate subtitle tracks.
2, if you select more than one subtrack, the first in the list will be burnt in and not the one you designate to be burnt in. For example, if you select all the three subtracks of the above video (again: you shouldn't) and enable the Burned In checkbox of the second element (in the following case, English) HB will just ignore your selection and burn in the subtrack of the first-selected language (here, Finnish):
+1,that's a great write up thanks Menneisyys2 I'm sure this and all your other how to's will help many more people in months and years to come.
Thanks! I tend to cross-post my articles / tutorials into forums I'm a regular at so that they can help as many people as possible.
For example, I've just cross-posted my just-readied article on AAC track adding with Subler to https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/15973288/
Menneisyys2, your articles are so well written I am saving them all. I am familiar with some of the things you have written about, but yours are so well explained that if some asks me I am planning on giving them these articles, rather than try to explain it myself. Thanks so much for taking the trouble to write these, more so because I am guessing that English is not your first language!
(BTW, I've just added a completely new section on doing the same to MKV files. See https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/15977557/ )
Thanks for the very kind words to you all. I love writing; this is why I sometimes publish two or even three iOS tutorials a day. For example, today, I've posted two full articles in the Hacks forum here, both with absolutely unique, never-before-published content (e.g., bugfixing advice). It's worth following my posts by clicking my nick and selecting my posting history ;-)