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Backing up HDDVD/Blue-ray movies into a single video file; playable anywhere

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I've been reading through the various threads here and on other forums that discuss how to back up HD movies onto the hard drive but no-one seems to be doing what I'm looking for.

Why is it that everyone ends up with a complex array of multiple files that are only playable using specialized players such as Nero?

With regular DVDs, Media Center and all other basic HTPC software can play them, including from the hard disk once backed up. By playing the DVDs from the hard drive, my 6 year old isn't destroying the DVDs or making a mess with DVDs all over the place.

Core HTPC software can also play back all regular unprotected HD formats, including high definition .mpg, avi, dvr-ms, wmv, etc. Unfortunately none of the core HTPC software can play back HD-DVD or Blue-ray, even if unprotected and backed up on the hard drive. In order to play these HD disks we currently use the not very well integrated (into Media Center) PowerDVD Utra (not to mention sometimes PowerDVD screws up when my wife or children are using it). This is what I want to work around and I want to be able to play these HD movies using the core HTPC software, not PowerDVD or Nero.

Here is what I want to do with some of our collection, especially our children's movies:

- Just the core, basic movie in a single file
- No multi-angle views or any of these special features
- No extras
- Full 1920x1080 resolution
- No loss in video quality
- No change to the video compression format (VC-1 stays as VC-1, mpeg-2 stays as mpeg-2, etc.)
- High quality 6-channel audio
- Doesn't need more than one audio track as long as 6-channels are included and in english
- DTS, DD5.1 or 6-channel discrete would be fine
- Doesn't matter what container (AVI, MKV, dvr-ms, etc.) is used as long as standard DirectShow filters are available
- Ideally a very standard, common container/file type would be used (like AVI, mpg, etc.)

Do any of you have any links to "how to's" to make this happen?

Is there any software out there that can do this job all on its own?

The other thing I'd like to be able to do is burn the movies to regular DVD for our road trip this summer (driving coast to coast). What we prefer to do for long drives is use Nero to burn DVDs using a resolution of the car's 2 DVD players (352x240) and fit as many movies as we can on a single DVD-9 (we typically can squeeze 15-18 hours per DVD with "good enough" quality so we aren't changing DVDs very often). This means that the container/file type/codec needs to be compatible with Nero (I'm not sure MKV is).
 
Did you get anywhere with this?

I think the Doom9 forum may be more help.

I have a Helios x5000 media player, and am attempting to put all my HD movies onto a NAS, but I'm not 100% clear on the most efficient method to reduce their size, but not lose any quality. I'm currentl experementing with
TMPEGEnc 4 xpress, and DivX...

anybody else seen any good results?

Paul.
 
1) Install Cyberblink PowerDVD.
2) Rip the blu-ray movie to disk
2) Drag and drop the largest .m2ts file from the "streams" directory into "TS Muxer" to pull out the unwanted audio streams and save it.
3) Then double click the file to play it in Windows Media Player.

Do a search on google.com for TS Muxer and download it. Its free and doesnt need instructions to figure it out.

EDIT: This method is only for Blu-ray. I'm not sure about HD-DVD.
 
1) Install Cyberblink PowerDVD.
2) Rip the blu-ray movie to disk
2) Drag and drop the largest .m2ts file from the "streams" directory into "TS Muxer" to pull out the unwanted audio streams and save it.
3) Then double click the file to play it in Windows Media Player.

Do a search on google.com for TS Muxer and download it. Its free and doesnt need instructions to figure it out.

EDIT: This method is only for Blu-ray. I'm not sure about HD-DVD.

Is it really that simple!

Does this work for all Blu-ray movies? Do the .m2ts files play reliably? Do they work with other DirectShow players like Media Player?

If this really works I'll have to pick up AnyDVD HD (I don't own it yet - wanted to make sure I could do what I wanted first) and give it a try.

What about HD-DVD? HD-DVD is probably even more important for me to be able to extract the movie since support for HD-DVD is going to dwindle over time.
 
Did you get anywhere with this?

I think the Doom9 forum may be more help.

I have a Helios x5000 media player, and am attempting to put all my HD movies onto a NAS, but I'm not 100% clear on the most efficient method to reduce their size, but not lose any quality. I'm currentl experementing with
TMPEGEnc 4 xpress, and DivX...

anybody else seen any good results?

Paul.

Have you had a chance to try mkanet's method?
 
Have you had a chance to try mkanet's method?

I can confirm this works, once you have ripped movie use tsremux to remove unwated audio/subtitles and play with nero/windows media player/powerDVD etc. I am now looking for a encoder that will convert the file to DVD, I have a lot of programs like: H.264 Encoder, Adobe Premiere, VideoReDo, Ulead Video Studio 11, none of them handle these files. The only one that will convert is Nero but there is a slight judder!!!! Can anyone help me with this?


ty
 
When I first came to this forum a couple of months ago, there were 2 guides in the stickies that helped me tremendously! I don't know why they were un-stickied, but they're still around...

A Layman's Guide to Shrinking Blu-ray Size on Hard Drive:
http://forum.slysoft.com/showthread.php?t=11770

A Layman's Guide to Shrinking HDDVD Size on Hard Drive:
http://forum.slysoft.com/showthread.php?t=11241

These both look more complicated than they really are because a lot of time is spent on converting subtitles, which I personally didn't need for English movies. :)
 
EVOdemux does the same thing for HD DVD disks, but you need to be able to play EVO files as it does not convert. Nero Showtime plays everything just fine for me. Arcsoft Total Media Theater is supposed to play both m2ts and evo files but it crashes on about half of my EVO files. I have not yet tried to get Media Player classic to work with either.
 
EVOdemux does the same thing for HD DVD disks, but you need to be able to play EVO files as it does not convert. Nero Showtime plays everything just fine for me. Arcsoft Total Media Theater is supposed to play both m2ts and evo files but it crashes on about half of my EVO files. I have not yet tried to get Media Player classic to work with either.

Is there something that will convert the EVO files into something else without fully decoding and recompressing the video?

I'm thinking of a parallel between converting a regular DVD or a regular mpeg-2 transport stream into an .mpg file. Basically changing the "container", not the compressed video itself.

Ideally the video and audio within an m2ts file would also be moved into another standard container.

If you have PowerDVD Ultra installed, will the DirectShow filters that install be able to allow regular players (like Media Center) to play m2ts and EVO files? What does it take to get this to work?
 
Is there something that will convert the EVO files into something else without fully decoding and recompressing the video?

I'm thinking of a parallel between converting a regular DVD or a regular mpeg-2 transport stream into an .mpg file. Basically changing the "container", not the compressed video itself.

Ideally the video and audio within an m2ts file would also be moved into another standard container.

If you have PowerDVD Ultra installed, will the DirectShow filters that install be able to allow regular players (like Media Center) to play m2ts and EVO files? What does it take to get this to work?

I don't know... this was as fas as I went. With Showtime playing both m2ts and evo files with no problems, I stopped there. All I wanted was to strip out the crap - subtitles, extra soundtracks and so on. That way I could squeeze a few more of my movies onto the hard drive for playback. being able to play them both works for me. I use MediaPortal and I setup Showtime as my external player.
 
With any dvd hd running in the background, u can use TsmuseR to only rip out the .mts you want, and have it remove all the presentation files, etc u want. it will also let you down convert audio if your "player" doesnt' let u stream it. I have a pioneer BD-95FD, and i can stream the resulting .ts to the player file by simply renaming it to mpeg. no judders or stuttering. quite amazing. I have just goteen a NAS to hold the files, since they are at about 19-25 gig. My next incursion into all this is how to shrink the files and maintain the quality I have now, and still stream them thru Home media gallery on the '95

mike


Is it really that simple!

Does this work for all Blu-ray movies? Do the .m2ts files play reliably? Do they work with other DirectShow players like Media Player?

If this really works I'll have to pick up AnyDVD HD (I don't own it yet - wanted to make sure I could do what I wanted first) and give it a try.

What about HD-DVD? HD-DVD is probably even more important for me to be able to extract the movie since support for HD-DVD is going to dwindle over time.
 
When I first came to this forum a couple of months ago, there were 2 guides in the stickies that helped me tremendously! I don't know why they were un-stickied, but they're still around...

A Layman's Guide to Shrinking Blu-ray Size on Hard Drive:
http://forum.slysoft.com/showthread.php?t=11770

A Layman's Guide to Shrinking HDDVD Size on Hard Drive:
http://forum.slysoft.com/showthread.php?t=11241

These both look more complicated than they really are because a lot of time is spent on converting subtitles, which I personally didn't need for English movies. :)
I would be very wary about assuming you do not need subtitles. You may watch different movies than me (in fact you probably do!) but more than 50% of my English language movies use a 'forced' subtitle stream for something - To translate odd lines of foreign language dialogue in an otherwise English movie (e.g Bourne movies, Rendition, even Ocean's 13) - or for captions giving times/dates/locations of various scenes. Even The Simpson's Movie had (just!) two lines of dialogue in a subtitle stream, for some tweeting birds and The Simpsons' dog.

I would say any process for remuxing movies must include a check for forced subtitles and forcing them in the new container if they exist.

Fortunately, once identified the subtitle stream takes about one minute to demux, re-encode and add to the new container - there is now no need to do any of the retyping/OCR reading of subtitles that many guides refer to.
 
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Is there something that will convert the EVO files into something else without fully decoding and recompressing the video?

I'm thinking of a parallel between converting a regular DVD or a regular mpeg-2 transport stream into an .mpg file. Basically changing the "container", not the compressed video itself.

Ideally the video and audio within an m2ts file would also be moved into another standard container.

If you have PowerDVD Ultra installed, will the DirectShow filters that install be able to allow regular players (like Media Center) to play m2ts and EVO files? What does it take to get this to work?
Check my guide here:

http://forum.slysoft.com/showthread.php?t=15543

It's actually very quick and easy (even including subtitles!) if all you want is the movie and one audio stream. No video is re-encoded.

Playback in VMC or WMP is fine, even forced subtitles will play perfectly without any user action. Other players (like Media Player Classic) are only needed to be able to easily change subtitle or audio stream.
 
Check my guide here:

http://forum.slysoft.com/showthread.php?t=15543

It's actually very quick and easy (even including subtitles!) if all you want is the movie and one audio stream. No video is re-encoded.

Playback in VMC or WMP is fine, even forced subtitles will play perfectly without any user action. Other players (like Media Player Classic) are only needed to be able to easily change subtitle or audio stream.

Jong, thanks for both the link to your guide and writing it.

You have covered exactly what I was looking for as far as HD-DVD is concerned.

One thing I was a little confused about is the audio stream. Does MKV support DD5.1 and DTS? If so, for my needs I think those would be ideal - without any transcoding. All of my movies have at least one of these and to be honest the sound quality is plenty good enough. I haven't found any need to use the newer audio formats. My home theater room is only set up with 5.1 audio and doesn't really support the newer 8-channel lossless audio formats. My HTPC has DTS Connect, so I can play TrueHD by re-encoding it to DTS but I don't find it really sounds any better than an original DD5.1 track (some of my movies have both TrueHD and DD5.1 tracks).

One thing I'm a bit surprised about is the fact that no-one has written a bit of code to do everything your guide does with a user friendly, easy to operate GUI. It wouldn't take much for someone with coding skills to take it to the next level by doing this.

Have you written or do you know of a link to a similar guide for Blue-ray?

Thanks for your help.
 
Yep. MKV supports DD5.1 - it is otherwise known as AC3. Also DTS. Just use .ac3 or .dts for the extension when demuxing a track of either type and it will demux without transcoding.

I have chosen to keep TrueHD, re-encoded to FLAC, for the future, but I do understand what you say. There are some movies e.g Blade Runner on HD-DVD that ONLY have a TrueHD track - no DD. So there you have to do something. You can use eac3to to re-encode it straight to DD(AC3) @640kb/s, if you are happy with that. So no need for DTS Connect and you get the size down.

I agree what you say about the GUI. I am sure it will come. Probably sooner rather than later. there is a GUI for eac3to but it is not powerful enough for some of this yet, but it will come!

Not got round to Blu-ray yet. I think I will wait until people have seamless branching working properly.
 
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