Compressing a commercial Blu Ray movie to BD-5

vbimport
#1

Hey guys. Just thought I’d share this.

Inspired by the thread over at the DVDRebuilder subforum at doom9, I decided to try compressing a blu ray movie to fit a single layer dvd. Since I was using H264, this disk is designed to playback on a blu ray player, not a dvd player.

Ripping to the hard drive was easy using AnyDVD HD. According to jdobbs at doom9, you should inspect the files with BDedit, since some movies are apparently split into two or more m2ts files. The only two blu ray disks I have available have the entire movie on the first m2ts file, so this wasn’t a problem.

Unlike jdobbs, I’m not comfortable using command line functions for x264, so I used Ripbot264 for most of the work. Using two pass encoding and setting a hard limit on output size to 4.4gb, Ripbot has an output setting for blu ray that made this easy to set up. I kept resolution at 1920 x 1080 and did not change fps.

Some people recommend working with the audio separately using TsmuxeR to demux the audio. I had no problems converting the True HD audio to a smaller, 5.1 ac3 at 384 kbps within Ripbot.

This particular blu ray was 31gb, H264. Since I just have a dual core computer, encoding times were fairly extreme compared to what I’m used to with dvds. 16hrs to compress the movie and convert the audio. The output was a complete blu ray movie ready to burn to single layer dvd using ImgBurn in Build mode and using UDF 2.6.

The resulting copy plays well in my blu ray drive and looks great, but I don’t have a really big widescreen tv to test it on.

Final thougts…this is a chore using my current computer. A quad core cpu is going to be a necessity for encoding jobs using Blu ray as input.

#2

Interesting considering the output size. Quality would nodoubt improve keeping ac3 and reencoding to dvd9 in line with the amount of time needed to do it. What was the blue ray in question and what did you have to exclude to get it down to 4.4gb?

#3

This backup only contains the main movie and one soundtrack. It might be possible to improve the quality by changing the resolution to 1280 x 720, which would still be HD, but according to the thread I was reading over at doom9, jdobbs tried both ways and couldn’t detect differences on his large screen tv. So I went with the larger resolution. He went to a great deal of trouble to fine tune his commands for the x264 encoder though, so his videos may be a good deal better than mine.

Going to BD-9 would probably be a better option, but I didn’t have any DL dvds handy at the time. :slight_smile:

The movie in question is The Fifth Element.

One qualm I did have is one of the settings in Ripbot264. The movie is 23.976 fps, but Ripbot doesn’t have that exact setting for output. I used the closest thing, which was 24. There is no adverse affect from this that I can see, no audio/video sync problems and no stuttering on playback.

#4

I am trying to do this at present.

RipBot allows you to keep things like 5.1 surround sound but use a better AAC compression for it along with re-compressing the main movie using 2 pass x264.

After a bit of playing I am going to try and re-encode down to 4.4GB keeping 1080p and 5.1 audio at atleast 256K using LC AAC.

I have 2 quad core machines to play with, one is a HTPC setup (Q6600 at 2.4GHz) and my main work PC (Q6700 @ upto 3.6GHz)

RipBot can now handle multi viewpoint Blu-Ray movies and HD-DVD movies spread over several sections on the disc as my first attempt was trying to compress Close Encounters of the Third Kind which is 3 different versions of the same film using branching. 1.11.2 however has a bug with Vista 64 currently which is supposed to be fixed in 1.11.3 when its released.

#5

-encode down to 4.4GB keeping 1080p and 5.1 audio at atleast 256K

that sounds terrible :wink: why dont u use 8,5GB for 1080p and 4,3GB for 720p ones?