How to back up bluray, cheap and painless

Melonbread 2014-06-23 20:31:35 UTC #1

Ok here's the relatively painless no-learning-curve ez guide to backing up blurays...so you dont have to!

This is the guide I wish someone had made for me when i started. This looks like a lot but its as painless as it gets (assuming you want
movie-only, no menu, pick and choose audio tracks and subtitles compressed to a 25GB disc, as opposed to a full bluray clone with expensive 50gb blank discs)

Backing up blurays is an entirely different kettle of fish than backing up plain old DVDs. You can go through the learning curve with
clown, handbrake, etc etc etc., or just do what i do.

First of all, you have to buy AnyDVDHD to remove copy protection. Its $150 or $75 if you already have good old lifetime anydvd.
You kind of have to have it because otherwise its impossible to break copyright protection in several instances.
there's DVDfab which is also a pay service but Im not really sold on them. I'm not aware of anyone else.

Then you need media. If you want the good stuff get verbatim 25gb. If you want cheap get melody 6x 25gb. The melodys are cheap, burn well at
lower speeds, but there is a concern about longevity. you have to treat these backups like gold because they are fragile. Use jewelcases and
dont let your nasty little cousin get his pudgy beaters on them. dont lose your originals!

If you havent gotten a bluray writer yet you might want to get one that supports disc quality testing (mine doesnt pioneer bd208D).

Use AnyDVDHD to rip your bluray to image to your hard drive (right click rip to image).

Then use some kind of virtual mount program (I like Gizmo-dont use virtual daemon any more) to mount the image as a virtual disc.
You will now have a new virtual drive under computer with a drive letter, for instance "CD Drive (I:)Star Trek"

Ok so this is how I like my backups: no menu, forced subs for non-english parts, option for full english subs for parts that i cant clearly hear
i.e. arnold shwarzenegger, option for dir commentary audio track, and extras at the end.

Welp, unless you go through the learning curve you arent getting the extras at the end, BUT you can choose "quick play" in BD rebuilder which
gives you a tiny quick menu and includes all the features including extras. We'll get to that.

Now you have your image mounted. You want to inspect the audio streams and the subtitles to make sure they are the right ones you want to
keep and/or force.

Get the freeware program tsMuxer. run the gui version. click "add". navigate to the virtua;ly mounted img file i.e. the I: drive, BDMV folder, Stream folder,
now find the video stream that appears to be the correct size for the movie, i.e. the largest. choose it. uncheck the main movie video and the true HD audio.
The rest of them should be secondary audio tracks and subtitles. choose "demux". hit "start demuxing".

after its done go ahead and listen to the audio files. they should be playable on VLC or whatever audio program you use. I like to include
secondary AC3 regular english just in case and directors commentary. Remember the order of the audio tracks you want to keep.

open the freeware program suprip. Click open and navigate to the subtitle files you just demuxed. now step through to check which ones are which.
Remember the order of the subtitle files you want to keep.

Ok now open the freeware program BD Rebuilder. Youll need other programs with it you can go find those somewhere. Youre going to use it to compress
the movie to 25gb. BTW you can compress a bluray to a regular DVD size, burn it to a regular dvd, and play it in your bluray player, and it looks damn good.

Decision time:
do you want movie-only? Well choose "movie only" on bd rebuilder. check the audio streams you want to keep (remember the order?). you'll
always want to keep the tru HD audio as your primary. Check the subtitle streams you want to keep (remember the order?). Right click and choose force for the subtitles for
the nonenglish speaking parts. If you dont force subtitles they will default as off but be selectible on your bluray player with your remote.

You should be good to go. CLick start and wait. takes a while.

Do you want extras? Choose "quick play backup". this will make a bare bones menu version that includes extras. you can uncheck streams you dont want in
"edit quick play menu". Previewing streams in BD Rebuild didnt work for me so its all a crapshoot.

Including extras like coming attractions and fbi warnings isnt that big of a deal in sacrificing quality. i want quick n easy so i dont bother. maybe you can go
figure out how to preview each stream...maybe tsmuxer? bdinfo? Personally, i dont really care because compression of a 40GB movie to 25GB still looks fantastic.
Oh btw there's a quick-play threshold on how small of video files you want to be detected for quick play backup mode. You'll have to change that. Forgot where it was.

Problem:
theres some movies that mess you all up. for instance GI Joe Retaliation. Apparently it requires a setting in the main menu to get the audio file
to activate. If you go with "movie only" you aint got nothing coming through the speakers. Go with "quick play backup" and that takes care of that problem.

Then you got Cabin in the Woods. Now, you got your playlists and your streams. The playlists determine the order in which video files (streams) are played,
including extras and menu items etc. They use the playlists to determine which order the video pieces are played. Sometimes they shuffle it up to hassle pirates,
or maybe its to have all versions of the movie on one disc (directors cut, extra bloody version, rental, retail, etc). In this case go to
the slysoft (anydvHD) forums and see what other people do. Cabin in the Woods rental version uses playlist 771 for instance. you would choose "edit quick play menu"
and uncheck everything but playlist 771. Voila youre good to go. Watch out when you change modes it resets audio and subtitle choices.

Now you have the compressed bluray on your hard drive within the folders BDVM and probably CERTIFICATES. You can run another freeware program to make
the bluray file more compatible with most bluray players. its called AVCHD-patcher. Run it, choose, INDX 100, now drag the index.bdmv file from your BDMV
folder on to the little AVCHD window and boom you get a victory message. Now youre ready to burn.

Before you burn you may want to check everything is ok. use the freeware Potplayer to play the bluray file. I dont know how to test forced subs with pot player.

Use freeware imgburn. choose "write files/folders to disc". Drag BDVM and CERTIFICATES folder to imgburn. Youll want options/UDF 2.50 and burn it at 4x speed.
Some people say 6x is fine even for Melody media but i like to be careful.

Done. AFAIK this is all good and it's been working for me. I'm sure others know better than me, like for instance is AVCHD really necessary? Dunno.

theres a guide that helped me by milOtis somewhere on the internet if you want to get more info.

I dont often check in on this forum, so good luck. :))

Kerry56 2014-06-23 21:46:14 UTC #2

There is no need to use tsMuxeR as you described. BD Rebuilder can handle virtually anything you can throw at it, and if you know how to use the program, you can keep or discard any parts of the movie.

AVCHD-patcher is no longer necessary either.

The real problems start when the decryption programs don’t work exactly right. Sometimes it takes a bit of trial and error on their part, especially with those Blu-ray movies that have seamless branching. Finding the correct playlist for those does sometimes take a few days for Slysoft to figure out and apply to their decryption. And movies differ somewhat according to which version you have. The region A discs may be slightly different from region B or C.

One thing you haven’t mentioned is checking the size of the original movie. You should do this before anything else other than decryption. Some, not many, but some Blu-ray movies will fit onto a blank 25gb disc with no compression necessary at all. For those, you decrypt, make an ISO and burn. AnyDVD HD can do the first two steps, and ImgBurn does the last. I personally rarely do this, however, as I detest trailers, and warnings, and don’t need a menu often.

For small movies that can fit the main movie onto a 25gb disc without compression, I normally use ClownBD (a gui for tsMuxeR and eac3to), though it can also be done in BD Rebuilder, since BD Rebuilder will not re-encode a movie that already fits your target size.

Kerry56 2014-06-23 22:32:39 UTC #3

By the way, looking at your title, you mentioned cheap. AnyDVD HD isn’t the least expensive route to take, though it is one of the best, especially with new releases.

Less expensive, and good reliability would mean using MakeMKV in Backup mode. This would decrypt and rip the entire movie onto the hard drive for you to work with. And MakeMKV is free to use while in beta. All you have to do is input new beta keys each month or so.

So it is possible to do the entire process with only two free tools, MakeMKV and BD Rebuilder. The quality can be superb if you set BD Rebuilder to work in one of the high quality modes. Your only cost is time, and blank Blu-ray discs if you want to keep the movies on physical media.

texasjackson 2014-06-24 08:35:06 UTC #4

[QUOTE=Kerry56;2730364]By the way, looking at your title, you mentioned cheap. AnyDVD HD isn’t the least expensive route to take, though it is one of the best, especially with new releases.

I want to make sure I understand the capability here. Can I use MakeMKV to rip a blu ray that I have purchased, but what if I want to remove the previews and trailers (but keep subtitles) and burn to DVD5 so my kids can watch in the mini van?

coolcolors 2014-06-24 10:14:41 UTC #5

[QUOTE=texasjackson;2730395]I want to make sure I understand the capability here. Can I use MakeMKV to rip a blu ray that I have purchased, but what if I want to remove the previews and trailers (but keep subtitles) and burn to DVD5 so my kids can watch in the mini van?[/QUOTE]

That is to many compression your going to loose quality and BD there is no such thing as DVD5 for BD media…you have either 25/50Gig media. Only think I can think of is to use BDBuilder to shrink the movie down to 25 and no more cause you are going to give up valuable playback quality. DVD9 to DVD5 is for DVD movies only and some DVD5 compression comes up as blocking pixels. So either go 1:1 format or use something like BDBuilder to make is smaller but making it to small your taking chances of ruining the playback. BD media are still expensive but if done right you will get good burns and playback on standalone. Here how I would do a BD for 25/50g media. Use Anydvd HD rip to image and then use Imgburn(free program) to burn back to a blank 25/50g media as Imgburn is only a 1:1 format burning program to match the original size media. But for my money this works the best and for long term storage probably the best way to backup BD movies unless you got Tetrabytes of HDD space to store those ISO images of which I keep some and burn some to media. IMO

Kerry56 2014-06-24 11:32:13 UTC #6

You can use MakeMKV to rip the entire thing to a Blu-ray structure, or you can use it to rip to an mkv file, which will have only the main movie. If you rip to an mkv, you can remove or retain subtitle streams or audio streams as you wish. But ripping to Blu-ray format, you do not have those options to remove sections, and MakeMKV does not compress anything by itself, so expect large file sizes.

Burning to DVD5 would mean compressing the snot out of the movie, and your player would have to be able to playback AVCHD or Blu-ray structure on a DVD disc. Some players can handle AVCHD, but not many like full Blu-ray on a DVD5. In any case, BD Rebuilder can make such an AVCHD for you. Video quality will not be equivalent to the original, and the audio will have to be changed to simple AC3 also. This will take hours of encoding time.

But perhaps, you want DVD-video instead? If so, this can be done with BD Rebuilder also, in its alternate output mode. Not a quick conversion, but BD Rebuilder is without peers in this particular task.

Melonbread 2014-06-24 14:31:04 UTC #7

For bluray to DVD5 check out the guide written by Mil0tis elsewhere on the internet.

Melonbread 2014-06-24 14:32:00 UTC #8

great feedback kerry, thx. .

philamber 2014-06-24 18:37:18 UTC #9

If all you want to do is a straight movie only, single audio track and no or single sub-title track, all you really need is MakeMKV (to decrypt) and BDtoAVCHD (freeware).

BDtoAVCHD will also re-encode to to BD-5 or BD-9 (i.e. single or dual layer dvd disc size) in addition to other options such as 25 gb (single layer blu-ray) and will let you know what the quality of the output will be like with each of the options.

Steve33 2014-06-24 19:38:09 UTC #10

Good advice from phil and Kerry.

I use both BDRebuilder and BDtoAVCHD.

Generally now a days, I only make exact copies for playback on usb hardware media players.
For this I generally use BDtoAVCHD, have to be careful with it on a few of those blu-ray titles loaded with fake playlists as sometimes it won’t show the correct playlist but this is only for a few blu-ray titles.
It does fine for almost all of them.
I only use it for when I don’t want to compress the video.

It definitely doesn’t hurt to have both of those programs (for different purposes) as that is what I do.

texasjackson 2014-06-25 05:00:45 UTC #11

[QUOTE=Kerry56;2730404]You can use MakeMKV to rip the entire thing to a Blu-ray structure, or you can use it to rip to an mkv file, which will have only the main movie. If you rip to an mkv, you can remove or retain subtitle streams or audio streams as you wish. But ripping to Blu-ray format, you do not have those options to remove sections, and MakeMKV does not compress anything by itself, so expect large file sizes.

Yes, I should have been more clear. I want to know if I can take my Blu-ray and convert to DVD-video to play in the mini-van DVD player. If so, then do you rip the Blu-ray disk to Blu-ray structure or to mkv file? Then you use BD Rebuilder?

Kerry56 2014-06-25 06:12:31 UTC #12

Either way will work for input into BD Rebuilder. I would just rip the entire thing and let BD Rebuilder select the main movie for you when you convert to DVD-video. You will be able to select which subtitles to keep, though DVD subtitles are a different format, and the Blu-ray subtitles will be converted to that compatible format.

To make a DVD from Blu-ray, set the mode in BD Rebuilder to Alternate
Movie-Only Output. Remove the check mark from the box that says Output BD or AVCHD Compliant Structure. Put a check mark in the box next to DVD-5. Click Save.

And to rip the entire disc to the hard drive with MakeMKV, click on File–>Backup. Make certain to put a check mark in the box to remove encryption when that window pops up.

philamber 2014-06-25 18:13:45 UTC #13

[QUOTE=texasjackson;2730438]Yes, I should have been more clear. I want to know if I can take my Blu-ray and convert to DVD-video to play in the mini-van DVD player. If so, then do you rip the Blu-ray disk to Blu-ray structure or to mkv file? Then you use BD Rebuilder?[/QUOTE]
You could also use MakeMKV to make an .mkv file of the main movie with your choice of audio and sub-title(s) and then use AVStoDVD to convert the .mkv file into a high quality DVD. [Just look at Kerry56’s excellent guide for how to use AVStoDVD.

Liggy 2014-06-26 02:03:50 UTC #14

[QUOTE=philamber;2730422]BDtoAVCHD will also re-encode to to BD-5 or BD-9 (i.e. single or dual layer dvd disc size) in addition to other options such as 25 gb (single layer blu-ray) and will let you know what the quality of the output will be like with each of the options.[/QUOTE]
I wonder why anyone would still do BD-9? I can get a good quality BD25 recordable disc for about the same price as a good quality DVD9. (Probably the same is valid for cheap media, but nowadays I stick to Panasonic BD-R and Verbatim DVD+R)

Wombler 2014-06-26 05:34:28 UTC #15

I must look into this again. I have a BD writer that I’ve never got round to installing partly because media prices hadn’t dropped enough.

If they’re as cheap as that now then I might take the plunge.

[B]Wombler[/B]

philamber 2014-06-26 19:26:40 UTC #16

[QUOTE=Liggy;2730500]I wonder why anyone would still do BD-9? I can get a good quality BD25 recordable disc for about the same price as a good quality DVD9. (Probably the same is valid for cheap media, but nowadays I stick to Panasonic BD-R and Verbatim DVD+R)[/QUOTE]
Makes even less sense downunder as you can get decent quality BD-25 recordables for about half the price of dual layer Verbatim DVD+Rs.

However, I use the BD-9 option for series back-ups (e.g. Game of Thrones) when I can’t quite fit 2 episodes on a single BD-25 without re-encoding. What I do then is to do a simple BDremux of the longer episode, then a BD-9 re-encode of the shorter one, and then re-author them to a BD-25 with a simple menu using MultiAVCHD. That way there is no quality loss on the longer episode and the reduction in quality of the shorter episode, typically about 54 minutes, is negligible.

johnson876 2014-08-24 20:23:15 UTC #17

Try TDMore Blu-ray copy, a new Blu-ray copy software tested to be cost effective and reliable. See the reviews here: http://www.myce.com/review/tdmore-dvd-copy-blu-ray-copy-dvd-converter-blu-ray-converter-software-review-72397/

alan1476 2014-08-25 07:43:33 UTC #18

[QUOTE=johnson876;2734915]Try TDMore Blu-ray copy, a new Blu-ray copy software tested to be cost effective and reliable. See the reviews here: http://www.myce.com/review/tdmore-dvd-copy-blu-ray-copy-dvd-converter-blu-ray-converter-software-review-72397/
:D[/QUOTE]
I think they are referring to a free ware way to do this. Let me see if we can make a special place for TDMore other than the Gen forums. It is against forum policy and I say this with all due respect because I know you are new here, but we usually keep products separate and injecting a payware program into a thread about freeware is frowned upon, Like I said, no big deal Johnson, just thought I would bring you up to speed. It is great to have you here.

johnson876 2014-08-25 18:44:08 UTC #19

OK, i will obey this rule, on seeing this subject, i thought the user would like to seek something cheap to do blu-ray copy task, maybe in future, TDMore products have free version for users. Thank you very much for your kind suggestion.

cholla 2014-08-25 22:21:29 UTC #20

alan , I know your an admin so this isn’t intended to contradict what you posted in #18 . It is my understanding that as long as the thread is in " Movie Copy Software " instead of one of the software specific sub-forums any software in the broader category can be posted.
Of course it’s good to keep a thread on topic & this one does start out with “cheap”. Cheap doesn’t always mean free.
Also a lot of software has been brought up in reference to how much it costs & even what it can do. All payware. Including the first post by the OP.

DVDFab had Passkey Lite but I believe it is only for DVD.
For blu-ray they have a payware Passkey for bluray.