What is the prefered way to store blu's?

[AJ Bertelson]

For awhile I have been using the anothereac2gui program to store everything on blu's and it does the two things I like, keep the video loss less and converts the audio to lossless flac.


I have started to run into issues though with subtitles though, avatar and district 9. I have been trying to burn in the subs/force in the subs but those require a re-encode and I get a comrpessed file when I am done. I don't want to do that.


I attempted to rip one of my blu's as a bdmv structure and put it in one of my imported directories but sage was unable to play it back and I got an error on playback. I have heard that the BDMV is the best way to do it but is there any reason sage should not be able to playback the video file? I don't need menu's or anything I just want subtitles to work now.

I use anyDVD to rip the blu's

[Fuzzy]

Give MakeMKV a shot.

[stanger89]

Probably need more info on your setup to help answer why you're having trouble, it's probably a codec issue though.

Personally I have all my BDs ripped to BDMV structures ala Clown_BD to pull out the main movie. I've done some playing with MakeMKV and eac3to to convert to MKVs, but for some reason the MKVs don't play as smooth on my extenders.

[rxnelson]

Also I am pretty sure if playing back on pc you don't get subtitles in bdmv structure. The hd300 will do it I believe.

[AJ Bertelson]

Running sage 7 with arcsoft decoders on the h264.

Specs are x2 4800 with 780G and e8400 and 4870. Neither of them display the subs. The arcsoft decoders are the only ones I have on the PC. If I place the BDMV file in TMT3 it will playback in TMT3 with the subs, sage won't though. makemkv didn't do anything either.


I have attached my clownbd outputs though.

[AJ Bertelson]

So here is what I got last night with another EAC2GUI.

The captions are displayed correctly in media player classic but sage can not display them correctly, hell I even tried using the MPC decoder to see if that would work. There was an additional file in there called district 9 1080p h264 but I didn't copy that over to my editing station(EAC2GUI work was performed on a different workstation).


Still not certain what to do with the clownBD files.

[mguebert]

I am using EAC3togui also, I got it to work for me by only selecting the forced sub track (avatar) and using my HD300 and HD200 extenders I can see the forced subs if I turn them on in SageTV. They will not pop up automatically.

If I chose to rip the english and forced subs then they will both show up, which is why I now only rip the forced english subs.

[moamoa]

I use DVDFab to make an MKV 1080p H264 file and pick audio copy to keep the original DTS 5.1 audio. Video & Audio are both excellent on a 92" screen in full HD, so don't see the point saving full remux.

Also, it's very easy and simple to do and I do not want any solution that eats my time to do the conversion (don't mind the PC taking 5 hours!)

[RocKKer]

I keep the BRD structure for my rips, I found it was the only format that kept the forced subtitles for almost all my rips. Avatar and District 9 work perfectly, the only one I have an issue with is Apocalypto, it's the only one I have to turn the subtitles on when playing.

I use DVD-Fab (rip movie only) and BR-Rebuilder to re-encode to a smaller size and convert DTS to AAC for my HD200's. It can be set to re-encode to small (DVD-5) all the way up to no re-encode (ie: no size change). I haven't tried but I think with the no re-encode will put all the seamless branch m2ts files into one. EDIT (1/16/11): FYI - "no encode" mode will put all seamless branch m2ts files into one. It's a one step process (not including the rip of course) and IMHO it is easier to use than many other re-encoders. It can also output an iso file if you want the one file solution as well as other media types (iPad, iPod, MKV, none of which I have tried).

I tried to rip using MakeMKV but the subtitles gave me problems, I have to have subtitles so that was a deal breaker for me.

[rxnelson]

For all of you posting that subtitles work perfectly are you talking about folder structure for PC playback? I think that is what the OP is trying to do. I thought I read back in the forums when it was still beta that BD subtitles were not supported for PC playback.
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=51032
Has this changed?

[AJ Bertelson]

Well here is my current status, DVDfab did not work to display subtitles. I tried that alternative method and will display the results and it didn't work. I will post the folder results later.


Someone mentioned that it was a codec issue so I dug into that deeply last night. Since I have an hd pvr I use Total media extreme on all my client. Its the only way I can get the the recordings to display, Media player classic won't display them, the ms decoders won't display them and whenever I try to change the decoders sage will always default back to arcsoft. I've changed the properties file to the MPC - Video decoder and sage does not take advantage of this. I am going to attempt to use my TMT 3 decoders that I got from the platinum edition, I always assumed sage was using TMT3 and not TME. This is what I am going to do
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showp...&postcount=316


The reason I found this out is because TME pegs my cpu usage in sage at near 90% whenever it is used and I can't offload it to my video card. I uninstalled TME and then gave the antipack a try and it worked as far as cpu usage was concerned. My MKV's dropped next to nothing in cpu usage, subtitles still didn't work, but a more important thing is that none of my HD PVR files that got recorded would work. So now I am left with three things


1)How can I get the subtitles to work?
2)How can I get my HD PVR files to work without using TME?
3)How can I lower my CPU usage so I don't get dropped frames?


Its quite frustrating as I have stayed up many a late night trying to figure this crap out. I have been using direct show filter manager to figure out some of this stuff.

[Bacon2002]

Hi,

I am playing around with the problem of choosing a format for storing my Blu Rays at the moment, I like the idea of storing Blu Rays as ISOs, I have produced some MKV files using both MakeMKV and DVDFab, can someone explain what is the benefit of MKV files over ISO files?

The ISO gives you a copy of the original disk and it plays directly from SageTV (assuming of course you are running CloneDVD and AnyDVDHD in the background).

Perhaps I am missing something but it occurs to me that the MKV file are of a similar size and you could make an MKVs or similar from the ISO file at any time in the future so why use MKV files?

Thanks,

David

[RocKKer]

AJ Bertelson:
Are you selecting subtitles in your rip?
Check this with Mediainfo, there should be a text stream included in the m2ts. (mine shows "English,PGS").

I use TMT3 to display on my desktop before moving to my media server, generally if it works there then I am relatively assured HD200 will play.

Is this a W7 system?

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by Bacon2002

I am playing around with the problem of choosing a format for storing my Blu Rays at the moment, I like the idea of storing Blu Rays as ISOs, I have produced some MKV files using both MakeMKV and DVDFab, can someone explain what is the benefit of MKV files over ISO files?

MKVs don't need to be mounted.

ISOs just add extra unnecessary complexity to the whole process. If you don't want to remux to a single file, just leave the whole BDMV structure intact.

[RocKKer]

Originally Posted by Bacon2002

The ISO gives you a copy of the original disk and it plays directly from SageTV (assuming of course you are running CloneDVD and AnyDVDHD in the background).

Perhaps I am missing something but it occurs to me that the MKV file are of a similar size and you could make an MKVs or similar from the ISO file at any time in the future so why use MKV files.

I use BRD structure simply because subtitles work flawlessly (forced and otherwise). Nothing against the single file per movie method though.

BRD structure (unlike iso) plays on any PC in the house without the need to virtually mount it.

FYI - STV7 natively plays iso's, no need for a virtual mount.
EDIT - Correction with regards to virtual mounts, this is only true in Linux - Thanks Fuzzy!

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by RocKKer

FYI - STV7 natively plays iso's, no need for a virtual mount.

Not true. SageTV7 supports virtual mounting on the fly if you are either in Linux, or windows with VirtualCloneDrive installed.

The only reason I use .ISO for anything is if it gives me an actual advantage. To this date, the only advantage I've found to ISO's is that with 3D BluRay's, they are considerably smaller (as unwrapping the ISO to folder structure duplicates a LOT of data).

[AJ Bertelson]

So here is what I have.

all of the mediainfo attachments show subs all the time, I have attempted to attach the media info with the way the stuff is stored. I have also attached the DVDfab settings.

None of these will display subtitles in sageTV but they all display subtitles in media player classic.


Aww what in the blu hell, I had four attachments and they didn't post. I will have to put them up tonight.

[astraub]

Please note - this also works on a Windows PC.

On my Mac server (actually running SageTV7 (Win) under Parallels) I use handbrake to shrink the BluRay m2ts files. Using a constant quality factor of 20 yields in file sizes between 5 and 10GBytes. Handbrake can even passthrough DTS (also from DTS-MA) tracks as well as passthrough AC3 tracks. I have not tried Dolby+ HD audio yet, as only very few disks use this. Overall this helps me reducing filesize by a typical factor of 3-4 without loosing any visible quality. All this - of course - using the mkv container format, which also allows adding the subtitles, if needed.

Please note that handbrake is also available for Windows.

Finally a note on subtitles:

Those are stored as pictures on BluRays. That's the reason they do not transfer easily. You can demux the main movie resulting in one or more ".sup" files. Those have to be converted into real text (.srt) files, that SageTV and the extenders can work with. I found a little windows program called suprip (http://www.videohelp.com/tools/SupRip), that does this conversion. Usually i only select the forced subtitles to convert. Quite often you have to do some manual corrections to the resultig text (.srt) files.

It is not necessary to directly integrate the .srt file into the final mkv - though handbrake can do this, if wanted. It is good enough to just drop the subtitle file into the same folder as the .mkv file.

Greetings
Andreas

[AJ Bertelson]

Here were my attachments from last nigh

[AJ Bertelson]

So I played around with graphedit last night and I noticed something on there. The files for avatar and D9 both show a pinout for subtitles but it doesn't connect to anything.

I am playing around with the antipack now but I am still getting high cpu usage with it and dropped frames like crazy, also it doesn't work with all my playback files.


So the codecs for me are really bugging me and I just ended up uninstalling most of them. I then went digging for an FFDshow DXVA and found a codec pack called sharky007. I figured what the heck at this point I may as well try it. So I downloaded it and threw the files in graphedit and the pinout for the subs finally went some where. I believe it was vodsub or something like that. What codecs are the people with working subs using and how does it display in graph edit?


I believe I am getting closer to this but it really is resolving around figuring out what codec is the best for me. I tried the divx codec and that played back some of the stuff fine but not all of it. Its pretty hard to find a DVXA codec that works on everything.