It took me a good couple of months before I could successfully rip blu rays to MKV with the preserved HD audio track, and be able to play them with any media player(that supports mkv and hd audio of cause). All the walk throughs and software I tried before could rip to MKV but the HD audio was either lost, or could not be played back, or stuttered.
I finally stumbled across a walk through that works! But because I dont want to keep the lossless video which takes up a lot of space, I had to add my own step to down size the video yet still keep the original resolution. If you are stuck in the same situation as I was, hopefully this will help you. If you think or believe that there is no difference between DTS and DTS-HD Master Audio, then this thread will make your blood boil.
If you simply just want to rip the whole lossless blu-ray to mkv without downsizing the video, then ignore my walk through and jump straight to the original walk through:
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/htpc-systems-software/23293-ultimate-htpc-software-guide-xbmc-mpc-hc-bitstreaming-ripping-blurays-7.html#post399366
What you need
- All the applications mentioned in the above walkthrough
- Handbrake: http://handbrake.fr/downloads.php
1 - Rip full blu-ray to disk
- Use AnyDVD or a similar software to rip the full blu-ray to your hard drive.
- Make sure u select the copy full blu-ray to folder, do not rip to MKV or any other format
2 - Rip the video track to mkv
- Install and run Handbrake
- Add the folder source produced by step 1.
- Select the destination folder that you will rip to. If you can, make sure the destination is on a different hard drive to speed up the IO/read-write process.
- In the first tab, make sure it does not try to resize the resolution. By default Handbrake will get rid of the letterbox(top and bottom black bars). So disable auto cropping and scaling. Cropping must be 0(zero) for top, bottom, right, and left. The size must be the same as source, eg. 1920/1080
- On the "Video" tab you can play around with the settings on the left hand side if you understand what they mean.
- On the right hand side I found that the "Constant Quality" option works for me: yielding a good picture quality with every rip. I set mine to 20, which at average shrinks the video to a 1/10 of the original size(not resolution, but size to disk), and always produces a great picture quality. setting it lower will give you an even better picture quality but bigger file size. You can read up more on it here: https://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/ConstantQuality
- Now to the "Audio" tab, remove all audio tracks. We dont want Handbrake to rip the audio because with my experience it does not do HD audio well. Its fine for standard definition tracks, but not for HD, which is what this walk through is about. So the resulting MKV will be soundless.
- Move to the "Subtitles" tab and do the same as you did in the previous tab, remove all subtitles.
- Now you are ready to encode so, fire!
3 - Rip the HD audio tracks and subtitles
Navigate to the original walk through with the link I added above. Follow the steps for using Eac3to. However, ignore the part that has to do with the video track because that has been done with handbrake. We are only interested in audio and subtitles. So at the end, Eac3to should only produce the audio track, subtitles, chapters.txt, and the other stuff. Also make sure to output those to the same location as the MKV produced in step 2.
4 - Prepare the subtitles
- Follow the original walk through's subtitles section
5 - Put everything together with mkvmerge
- Again, follow the original walk through for mkvmerge. The only change is that you will use the MKV we created with handbrake.
The produced MKV file should be the same resolution as the source with subtitles if you added any, and of cause, with High definition audio. I did this with three movies and it worked well all the time.
I finally stumbled across a walk through that works! But because I dont want to keep the lossless video which takes up a lot of space, I had to add my own step to down size the video yet still keep the original resolution. If you are stuck in the same situation as I was, hopefully this will help you. If you think or believe that there is no difference between DTS and DTS-HD Master Audio, then this thread will make your blood boil.
If you simply just want to rip the whole lossless blu-ray to mkv without downsizing the video, then ignore my walk through and jump straight to the original walk through:
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/htpc-systems-software/23293-ultimate-htpc-software-guide-xbmc-mpc-hc-bitstreaming-ripping-blurays-7.html#post399366
What you need
- All the applications mentioned in the above walkthrough
- Handbrake: http://handbrake.fr/downloads.php
1 - Rip full blu-ray to disk
- Use AnyDVD or a similar software to rip the full blu-ray to your hard drive.
- Make sure u select the copy full blu-ray to folder, do not rip to MKV or any other format
2 - Rip the video track to mkv
- Install and run Handbrake
- Add the folder source produced by step 1.
- Select the destination folder that you will rip to. If you can, make sure the destination is on a different hard drive to speed up the IO/read-write process.
- In the first tab, make sure it does not try to resize the resolution. By default Handbrake will get rid of the letterbox(top and bottom black bars). So disable auto cropping and scaling. Cropping must be 0(zero) for top, bottom, right, and left. The size must be the same as source, eg. 1920/1080
- On the "Video" tab you can play around with the settings on the left hand side if you understand what they mean.
- On the right hand side I found that the "Constant Quality" option works for me: yielding a good picture quality with every rip. I set mine to 20, which at average shrinks the video to a 1/10 of the original size(not resolution, but size to disk), and always produces a great picture quality. setting it lower will give you an even better picture quality but bigger file size. You can read up more on it here: https://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/ConstantQuality
- Now to the "Audio" tab, remove all audio tracks. We dont want Handbrake to rip the audio because with my experience it does not do HD audio well. Its fine for standard definition tracks, but not for HD, which is what this walk through is about. So the resulting MKV will be soundless.
- Move to the "Subtitles" tab and do the same as you did in the previous tab, remove all subtitles.
- Now you are ready to encode so, fire!
3 - Rip the HD audio tracks and subtitles
Navigate to the original walk through with the link I added above. Follow the steps for using Eac3to. However, ignore the part that has to do with the video track because that has been done with handbrake. We are only interested in audio and subtitles. So at the end, Eac3to should only produce the audio track, subtitles, chapters.txt, and the other stuff. Also make sure to output those to the same location as the MKV produced in step 2.
4 - Prepare the subtitles
- Follow the original walk through's subtitles section
5 - Put everything together with mkvmerge
- Again, follow the original walk through for mkvmerge. The only change is that you will use the MKV we created with handbrake.
The produced MKV file should be the same resolution as the source with subtitles if you added any, and of cause, with High definition audio. I did this with three movies and it worked well all the time.
