How to rip TV show DVDs? Or How to "automate" ripping TV show DVDs?

[stanger89]

OK, so for a long time I've simply ripped my TV show DVDs as full DVDs. This works pretty well with the stock UI and really I'm mostly happy.

Two things have/are making me reconsider the way I handle my TV show storage, one is the current/upcoming cool customizations available for handling imported TV. For these I can see it being quite nice to have each episode ripped individually.

The second is I got bored and started playing with avisynth again, and I've found I can do some amazing things with it, specifically with animated/anime content. For a slight background, I've got a couple BD Anime sets recently, some are native HD and some are upconverts. Long story short, the upconverted BDs looked quite a bit better than anything I'd seen done "on the fly" from DVD.

So I've been playing lately with ripping some of my Anime to individual episodes and upconverting to 1080p in the process, with a bit of Avisynth magic along the way.

The quality results are great, but the work isn't so much. Right now, my process goes like this:

1. Open rip in DVD Shink
2. If lucky, rip each episode/title to a "DVD", otherwise hunt down the chapters for each episode and rip them to a "DVD" of each episode
3. Open each episode in Megui 1-click encoder
4. Patch in secondary audio track if missing
5. Queue episode and repeat, then start encoding
6. Open each episode in SubRip
7. OCR the sub tracks and save
8. Wait for megui to finish then open each encoded episode in MKV Merge
9. Add in the missing subtitle tracks and mux to final SageTV location

It's more steps than it is work. But I'd love to automate it more. I know there's MakeMKV but as far as I know it doesn't do any encoding. And as far as encoding, I generally don't encode any of my rips because I value quality over storage space, so I'm very out of the loop on what's out there encoding wise.

My dream situation would be something I could point at a DVD, and an AVIsynth profile, and hit go and have the same result the above process gets me, an 1080p upconverted MKV with the right languages and subs.

I don't think that's possible, mainly the episode part, since as I noted a number of my rips have all the episodes as one title. So what I'm really hoping is out there is something that I can feed a DVD, and then queue up certain chapters/titles to be encoded against and avisynth profile.

So, any thoughts?

[bcjenkins]

can you automate it with AutoIT?

[stanger89]

It's possible, it's also possible I could somehow do it with just a batch file or something. But there are a ton of DVD ripping/encoding softwares/solutions out there so I'm really kind of curious if what I want already exists. I mean I figure there's got to be something that I can just point at a folder and a profile and say "make it so", sort of like MeGui's one-click encoder, but that would handle subs too.

That's the kicker though, the subs and the avisynth. I know there's mediashrink on the forum here, but as far as I know that used handbreak and can't use avisynth, and I'm not sure a lot of stuff can do subs automatically either.

I mean if it really came down to it, megui and mmg are just guis for command line tools in essence, so I could probably automate a lot of that the hard way.

[reggie14]

What sort of subtitles do those rips have? I know how much of a pain it can be to work with subtitles. I've been ripping movies to put on my iPad, and I need to go through a very long process to get the forced subtitles burned into an encoded H.264/m4v file for playback on the iPad.

I know the Handbrake developers are somewhat interested in adding support for PGS subtitles, so things might be better in the future.

But I don't know of any other way than basically what you described above.

[ohpleaseno]

I bet you could get something that approximates "automated" using DVD Decrypter, SJQ and Mediashrink. If you set an import folder as the folder you rip TV Show discs to and have SJQ monitor it, Mediashrink will separate most of the TV Show discs into individual episodes. The problem then becomes renaming the individual files.

[gplasky]

Does this help at all? I just took a quick glance thru it.

How to convert a multi-feature DVD+/-R to DivX/XviD with ease using free software

I know it references divx but you can probably change that. Hope it helps.

Gerry

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by reggie14

What sort of subtitles do those rips have?

They're whatever the default is in Subrip, which I don't remember at the moment.

Originally Posted by ohpleaseno

I bet you could get something that approximates "automated" using DVD Decrypter, SJQ and Mediashrink.

Problem is Mediashrink, as far as I know, doesn't support AVISynth, and if I can't get AVISynth processing there's no point in transcoding, I'd just use MakeMKV, or just use DVD Shrink and leave them as DVD structures.

That's really the crux of my search, something that will automatically transcode a DVD structure into an MKV using AVISynth and including subs (and not hard coding the subs into the video).

[wrems]

I'm curious, what makes avisynth better or more coveted for your purposes? I really don't know the differences between avisynth and say handbrake for example...

[stanger89]

AVISynth isn't an encoder, it's a scripting language/frame server for video processing with basically infinite options. It has very advanced deinterlacing and inverse telecine plugins/scripts, denoise, sharpening, resizing, etc, and all kinds of other stuff. The way I'm using it the result of the the AVISynth script gets piped into x264 for actual encoding.

[Taddeusz]

I'm not sure you stance on rendering the subtitles into the video but you can use SupTitle, a subtitle render plugin for AviSynth, to use Blu-ray subtitles without needing to OCR them first:

http://www.zachsaw.co.cc/?pg=suptitl...visynth_plugin

[stanger89]

I don't really want to render them in, because I'm planning to keep more than one set (both the subs/translations and the captions).

But on the up side, I think I may have found my answer, StaxRip, lets run down the list:

1. It lets you define profiles that affect how it behaves (which audio languages you want, encoder settings, etc).
2. If you point it at a set of VOBs, it automatically scans them and selects the appropriate audio streams based on the profile and automatically adds all the sub tracks to the mux (VobSub I believe).
3. It's AVISynth based.
4. It appears (but I haven't tried) that if I rip a whole bunch of episodes to individual folder/DVD structures, I can just point it at the parent directory and it will automagically queue them all up.

Regarding 3, it took me a bit to see how the AVISynth stuff works but I was able to successfully define a profile that:

• Loads a VirtualDubPlugin, DotCrawl, to clean up some dot crawl on the DVDs I'm playing with at the moment.
• Loads/applies aWarpSharp
• Loads/applies Lanczos4Resize

This is everything I was looking to do AVISynth wise. Before you ask, I wouldn't think of running these filters on live action content, but warp sharpenning works miracles (IMO) on animation. It has a rather amazing ability of doing some subtle smoothing/denoising (or appears to) but more importantly it basically "undoes" the line spreading that the resize/scaling usually does. So you end up with something that while obviously not having the detail a true HD source would, has lines that really look "HD native".

I'll have to play with this some more, mainly see if the vobsub subs that it does actually work in Sage (on extenders), but also if 4 is really true, if I can just point it at a folder containing say a whole season of episode rips and have it automatically do them all.

[stanger89]

So I've run into a bit of a snag with this. The problem is as mentioned I've got a number of discs that have all episodes back to back in a single title. This means I have to go through with DVD Shrink or similar to split the episodes manually. I'm "OK" with that part, the problem is it appears the VSrip (which is what Staxrip uses to extract subs) messes up the timing of the subs, basically sticks them at their absolute position on the DVD, not their relative time within the episode. So for example the second episode will be show as 48 minutes long instead of 24, because the sub track starts at 24 minutes and goes to 48 even though the video starts at the beginning.

Now I tried DVD Shrink and DVDFab and both have the same result. Yet when I did subs with subrip, I didn't have that problem but with that the subs are a very manual process.

Any ideas?

[bastafidli]

Handbrake

[stanger89]

Handbreak doesn't do AVISynth, unless something changed recently.

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Handbreak doesn't do AVISynth, unless something changed recently.

Why do you need avisynth?

[stanger89]

Because it's got lots of powerful processing filters (TIVTC for one).

[Taddeusz]

I'm not sure how I. Compares to avisynth but Handbrake is really good at reverse telecining.

[stanger89]

I'd be pretty surprised if it's as good, but that's just one example, another is dot crawl. AVISynth has some great filters for removing it, which can work wonders on older, less-well-authored stuff.

[Taddeusz]

Maybe I'm not using the right plugin but in my experience Handbrake does a much better job than MeGUI which does use avisynth.

[stanger89]

Of course the real issue is I have absolutely no interest in saving space, because that costs quality, however, I have found that for animated content, AVISynth can do a noticably better job of upconverting than anything else I have, be it the HD300, Samsung LED LCD, or VXP video processor in my projector, so that's really one of the two driving forces behind this whole "experiment", the other being breaking the rips up to individual episodes to take advantage of some of the new plugins.

Handbrake doesn't do any upconverting, it's impossible, and what little I've tried it this evening, it's hit-or-miss on subtitles.

Maybe I should just get a Lumagen Radiance XD and be done with it.