I currently use XBMC on a 2008 Mac Mini with a crystal HD card but I'm having trouble playing an MKV of Salt (2010) Blu-ray. I figure that this is only the first Blu-ray that will gives me trouble, so I'm building a Win7 HTPC. I currently rip DVD to video_TS and Blu-ray to MKV.

 

I'm planning to make Blu-ray and DVD ISOs. Which is the best software for this?

Which ripping software do you use?

 

Which software can I use to play the DVD and Blu-ray ISOs? I know that XBMC cannot play Blu-ray ISOs. Am I better off ripping to MKV?

 

Thanks,

David

 

Edit: I downloaded DVDFab 8 to an Win7 machine and it produced a MKV of Salt that plays perfectly on the Mini. Any comments on DVDFab 8?

I rip all movies to MKV. I use Handbrake, it is one of the few products out that a) is free and b) can handle more than one audio stream (as being german speaking I use to rip the german language and the original language. You won't believe how many jokes get lost in translation...), so multi-language is a must.

 

I run HandBarke on my unRaid Server as well, but it is a PITA for me because of the langauge settings. Sometimes english is 1, then german. Depends on the mastering company. So most of the times I use HandBrake GUI an my office PC with Windows XP.

 

I tag my movies using Ember Media Manager. Again, main problem is the language. Ember Media Manager searches different locations with the IMDB ID, but seldom finds an IMDB ID with the german title, only with the original title. So sometimes I have to search manually for the IMDB ID, and then it works. EMM searchs cover art, fan art and movie information, useable with Popcornhour or XBMC, funny enough the D-Link Boxee doesn't use this information at all.

 

I also discovered that movie sizes differ a lot. Same settings produce Blueray-MKVs between 3 and 16 GB - with both movies using 20 GB of space on the Bluray itself. What currently worries me is the time it takes to convert a Bluray-disc to MKV - using my 1 year old office desktop it takes 10 hours for one movie. But I've ordered an AMD Phenom II X6 1100T system (and yes, infected by building my unRaid server by myself I ordered parts. Funny, I've ordered custom build systems for some years, but now the virus has me - again...), which should be quick enough to cut down the time to realtime - a little bit overclocked (3.3 Ghz to 4.0 Ghz should be stable). The six core AMD should be quicker than any quad core Intel, considering the price of motherboard and CPU (ASUS M4A89GTD PRO + CPU is 260 Euro over here , about 350 USD) there is currently no Intel combination available which beats AMD. Benchmarks which are not using all cores show Intel in front, but HandBrake fully uses all cores and thus AMD is my favorite.

Look into MakeMKV if you do not want the BluRay compressed at all, and you can select to keep only the main feature movie with whatever audio and subtitle tracks you desire. It will do the demuxing of the various streams you selected then remux them into a MKV container. The video and audio is left untouched. It runs as quickly as it can read the BluRay media and write the MKV to the hard drive.

 

As for creating various formats, a program called tsMuxeR does a decent job of converting from one format to another, including producing the BluRay BDMV structures.

 

 

I was using makeMKV on the Mini and it has worked for everything except Salt. The MakeMKV produced mkv of Salt kept halting on my old modded Mini; the video would stop but the audio kept playing. VLC could play it very poorly but without halting. The problem is somewhere in the combination of XBMC and CrystalHD. But that same system plays the DVDFab mkv flawlessly.

MakeMKV lacks some things that I need, though. Primarily it is the lack of sorting the audio tracks. I want german to be the first track, followed by the original track. If there is a second german track (DTS, for example), I want that track to be in front of the foreign language tracks. I didn't figure out how that could work, and I gave up on that.

 

Another thing is disk space. MakeMKV doesn't compress even VC1 video. VC1 can be compressed very well using x264 - without loosing to much picture quality.

 

And after all, MakeMKV is not free...

 

I use Handbrake, and my AMD Phenom II X6 1100T system (OC to 3.900 Ghz) is close to 20 fps when converting Bluray to MKV. And honestly, using the setting I use, you won't notice any quality loss on an HDTV. Audio is always streamed through, so no sync problems at all.

I had some issues with converting my HD-DVD media to MKVs because of the Dolby Digital Plus wasn't being handled properly by the XBMC players so here's the process I found for WinOS that worked well without compressing the video.

 

I also had an issue on a MKV produced by MakeMKV where XBMC would just stop in the middle of playback, so I used this process to re-rip the title and the results were perfect.

 

0. Use AnyDVD HD to bypass pesky protections

1. Use HD-DVD-BluRay Stream Extractor to extract the Chapters as Text, Video as pure video (non-MKV), Audio as AC3, Subtitles as SUP

2. Use BDSup2Sub to convert SUP subtitles to IDX/SUB files

3. Use MKVMerge GUI to reassemble pieces

 

The HD-DVD-BluRay Stream Extractor is a GUI front end to eac3to. When dealing with the audio, If the media had Dolby DTS EX or Dolby DTS then I would select Dolby DTS as the output format. If the media had Dolby Digital AC3 then I would select Dolby Digital AC3 as the output format. Those first two selections will extract the DTS core or AC3 audio untouched with no conversion process taking place. When I had to convert the audio, I would pick the highest lossless audio available and pick AC3 (Dolby Digital 5.1) as the output format.

 

Using MKVMerge GUI you can select the track order and set which ones are default so they should be preselected. You pick the video and audio tracks and then the IDX files for subtitles to add. Then in another tab you load in the chapter files. You might need to set the video format to 24000/1001 (23.976 fps) if the video rate isn't auto-detected.

 

Thanks so much for your post, BRiT. I've been trying for several days to figure out why XBMC was crashing when trying to play one of my HD-DVD's that I ripped using MakeMKV. I thought it might be an issue with XBMC or my Zotac ID11 and have been reading, researching and trying a bunch of things.

 

It was good to see someone else had a similar issue and found a solution.

 

When I started looking to find the tools that you used, I decided to check on the MakeMKV forum to see if anyone else had an issue with playing MKV's on XBMC and there was someone who suggested just running MKVMerge GUI on the MKV file. I did that and it works fine now.