How To Rip 4K Blu-ray Movies & TV Seasons in 2024! | COMPRESSION & MORE

hey everyone welcome back to the channel I'm Logan and today I figured it was just about time that we make another video talking about media management and how you can rip your 4K Blu-ray media collection over to some kind of a computer storage in order to stream that content over your local network and given that we've made like three other videos on this exact topic already you might be wondering why we feel the need to dive into this issue yet again well that's mainly because of the very helpful feedback that we've gotten from you guys on those other videos in terms of what kinds of things you'd like us to cover in these tutorials to make them more helpful and what I really want to dive into today are the different ways that you can process your media after the initial step of ripping your Optical discs for example maybe you have a movie that comes across multiple discs and you want to combine all of those into a single file or maybe rip the TV show and you need to split apart the resulting MKV file into individual episodes so you can get proper metadata in Plex or jelly fin or it could be something as simple as wanting to compress your mkvs for more efficient storage on your Nas or hard drive and all of these are going to require some extra steps that I'm going to be explaining in this video so let's go over the basics what you'll need and what kind of software you can use to convert your old discs into a Digital Collection we're going to be starting this guide off with our Blu-ray Drive and as of the time of making this video we still believe that the LG w14 ns40 is a really good option that's been really reliable ripping both 1080P and 4K Blu-ray discs for the last several months that we've been using it and this is a 5 and 1/4 in Internal Sata optical drive so if you have a desktop PC that can accept this kind of a drive you won't need anything but a screwdriver and maybe a SATA cable to get it connected but since I want to be able to rip Blu-rays using my Dell laptop which doesn't have any ports for this kind of a drive we also decided to use it with this OWC Mercury USB 3.0 enclosure which converts our 5 and a/4 in internal drive into an external drive that you can plug into just about any modern laptop or desktop with a usb3 port and just to address some of the comments that we got in the last video no we were not sponsored by LG or OWC when making either of these videos it's worth mentioning that the LG drive we used here didn't actually work for ripping movies Straight Out of the Box in order to get it working with 4K Blu-rays we needed to flash the firmware of the chip inside the drive to add support for Libra Drive access which is how The Ripping software communicates with the drive while ripping a 4K disc I'm not going to be covering that process in this video because we already went into detail in our last dripping guide so I'll be sure to leave a card right up here and a link in the description if you need to follow that part of the guide once you're done with that come back here at this point if your drive is ready to go you're going to want to install make MKV which is still the software that we recommend for ripping the data off of your physical discs without any loss in quality quality and thankfully this is a really easy process just go to make mkv.com and click the download section you'll see links to versions for both windows PCS and Macs both Intel and arm models are supported and once that's downloaded just click and run to install it like any regular program once it's installed you're going to want to load the beta key which is just a small code that you need to copy and paste into make MKV to let it run with all of the features you need the developer of the program offers a code for free that changes every 60 days and you can find it pretty quick on Google if you search make MKV Beta key so copy that go to make MKV and inside of the help menu at the top click register there you'll see a box to paste that code into and then hit okay relaunch make MKV and you should be good to go at this point you should be able to see some text on the right side of the window giving you information about your 4K Blu-ray Drive and lib Drive status should appear as enabled if you have a different value here then you may need to flash your dries firmware or search for compatible drive so refer to the make MKV Forum before going any further at this point we're just going to change some settings just to make life a little easier during The Ripping process so head on over to the view tab on the top of the window and click preferences from this window enter the general Tab and enable expert mode and don't worry this won't make it any more difficult to use it just gives us some extra options to customize while we're ripping our Blu-ray click apply to save that and next head on over to the language Tab and change your preferred language from none to whatever language you want to automatically grab subtitles and audio tracks for we speak English so that's what I'll be using here but for different types of content you can select whatever is most convenient this is just a little time saer that takes some of the guesswork out of selecting the tracks you want from a dis and at this point we're going to start talking about the different scenarios that you might run into while ripping a disc and the easiest one that I'm going to cover first is the situation where you have a single movie that comes across multiple discs for example we have the 4K extended Blu-rays of The Lord of the Rings trilogy and each one of the movies is actually split across two separate discs so you're meant to swap the discs about halfway through each movie and while you can watch multi-disk movies over the network it's still not as convenient as having the entire movie in a single file that you can stream without interruptions so what I'm going to show you here is how you can actually combine them into a single MKV file and to start you just need to do a normal rip of each disc so go ahead and put the first disc of the movie in the drive and click this button on the screen to open the disc our movie here has a few different tracks and I'm going to be right clicking and deselecting all of them and then checking the box for the largest track that appears closest to the top which is this 67 GB option right here if you expand that track you can see that only the English audio and subtitles are selected which is fine with us so now all we have to do is is choose a folder to save the movie to and then click the make MKV button this is going to take a while and it can vary a lot depending on the size of the movie and the speed of your drive but don't be surprised if you're waiting somewhere near an hour per disc once it's done ripping though you'll end up with a notification letting you know that the rip completed successfully if you got any errors you might want to try the rip again and with our first disc rips you can basically apply all the same exact steps to the second one being sure to match the same audio and sub track selections to avoid any conflicts and once you have both of your MKV files it's time to actually glue those two together and make a complete rip to do this we're going to be using a piece of software called MKV toolnix it's a completely free and open source application that supports basically every single platform imaginable all you have to do is go to https MKV tool. download which I'll link below and yes I promise that is the official site and from there you can go to the download tab and scroll down until you see an installer for your operating system I'm using Windows for this guide so I'll grab the 64-bit installer and run that once that's installed go ahead and run it and you'll be met with this basic user interface and here you can drag and drop the first of your two rips to load it into the software you'll see a lot more options appear but don't worry all you have to do is drag and drop the second rip onto the window and you'll get this dialogue asking you how you want MKV toolnix to handle the second file since we want to combine the two files into a single movie we're going to select the option to append to an existing source file once that's done hit okay and you should see both mkvs in the source file list with the second file being contained within the first if that's the case all you have to do now is choose a new file name for the destination file since by default it's set to the name of the first file which we don't want so just type in something unique and hit the start multiplexing button this process is pretty fast on my system and assuming you don't run into any errors the two files should be combined into a single MKV file that plays back to back from the end of the first file to the start of the second file and with that you're done the next scenario that I want to cover is specific to ripping episodes of TV series and it relates to how certain shows are stored on Blu-ray which can make it more difficult to get access to the individual episodes on the disc for the most part there are two ways that companies format these physical releases of TV shows some shows like our Blu-ray copy of the first season of The Walking Dead here are formatted as one title per episode meaning that for every episode on the disc it will appear as a separate entry in make MKV when you open the disc and if you have this kind of a disc you can just rip all the titles and put them straight into plexer jelly Fin and they'll show up as individual episodes so you're completely good to go the problem is not all discs are made this way and the other major format the companies use for whatever reason is the one title per dis format meaning when you try to rip these discs make MKV will only detect one title and you'll end up with a single MKV file that contains multiple episodes and the only thing separating them are chapter markers embedded within the MKV file since you have multiple episodes within a single MKV file your media server software won't exactly understand what's going on and you won't be able to get the correct metadata for the show you're trying to rip so to fix this we need to take that file and split it up into multiple files for each episode that was on the dis I don't want to show any copyrighted content in this video so I made a mockup video file that I'll be using to demonstrate this process but the main idea is going to be exactly the same for any dis you find formatted in this manner basically all you need to do is rip your Blu-ray disc using the biggest title that make MKV finds and open the resulting MKV in a program like VLC media player which will display all the chapter markers in the file you can see that my video file has nine different chapters and each episode has chapter markers that correspond with the intro episode content and the credits which is most common on these kinds of discs so what you need to do is scrub through the video file and try to find the chapters that indicate the breaks between the end of one episode and the beginning of another in the case of my video file which had three episodes I found that the first episode started at chapter 1 the second episode started at chapter 4 and the final episode started at chapter 7 so knowing all this information we can use MKV tool ni to split the file according to these chapter numbers and end up with individual MKV files to do that open MKV toolnix drag in the MKV file and then in this interface go to the output tab from here you'll see a section called splitting and you'll want to change the split mode from do not split to before chck chapters and in the Box for chapter numbers that appears I'm going to type in 1 comma 4 comma 7 the numbers corresponding to the chapters that each episode starts at with that hit the start multiplexing button and if all goes well MKV tool Nick should just spit out a new MKV file for each episode you entered the chapter number four so just repeat this for any dis that has its episodes formatted like this and you should be able to bring your series into Plex or jelly fin just fine and finally at this point point you should have all of your content ripped and made into MKV files with exactly the contents you want so the last issue that I want to talk about is that of compressing your movies and TV shows because these movies can take a lot of space and unless you want to invest a huge amount of money in hard drives you're going to run out of storage pretty quick our copy of The Fellowship of the Ring for example ended up being 114 GB for a single movie so this is where compression comes into play using a tool like handbrake which is free and avail available for Windows Mac OS and Linux you can drag and drop your MKV files in and re-encode them using a more storage efficient encoding and this sounds good in theory but there are a lot of considerations to make when compressing video since this video encoding is very computationally intensive you'll need to make sure you actually have Hardware that can keep up I have a ryzen 95900 x and using software en coding which offers the best visual Fidelity and space savings it can still take a while I wouldn't recommend compressing your 4K rips at all if you're using a laptop because it'll probably just take way too long to be worth your time if you still want to give it a try though there are a few guidelines that I can recommend if you have a GPU for example I have an RTX 3090 with nvidia's enven encoder you can try using the gpus built-in Hardware encoding to get better speed but this might not offer as good a visual quality or efficiency these options are available in the hardware section of handbrakes built-in and coder profiles for 4K movie try and coding it into 10bit h.265 HC video which is a lot more efficient than h264 and encoding into 10 bit will help ensure that you don't introduce color banding into the final output ultimately we don't compress our rips since we have the hard drive space and we just prefer to retain the original quality of the 4K Blu-ray discs while streaming over the network so going through all the time and trouble to compress them doesn't make a whole lot of sense to us but hopefully this still gave you a start and and helps you know where to look as far as figuring out how to handle compression there are a lot of other very highquality resources online regarding compression and they might be very helpful in finding a configuration that will work best for your Hardware to get the most efficient encoding possible and that's basically all I had to talk about so I think that's going to wrap it up for this video I hope you found it helpful and let us know if you're considering tackling a project like this and keep us updated on your experience let us know if you have any questions or comments down in the comment section below uh don't forget to like subscribe and ring the bell so you don't miss any of our future content and as always have an awesome day

Channel: TwoGuyzTech

Views: 39,605

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Id: XCdqg4DBYiA

Length: 14min 8sec (848 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 06 2024