Blu-rays disks are the new enemies of the digital nomad. While our phones and tablets travel the globe with us our personal movie libraries are stuck in the pre-mobile-entertainment era. However there are professional tools that enable us to copy HD films from Blu-rays discs and play them on any device without losing quality. Technology the process is not very difficult but there are coptyright ramifications. It is of course necessary to bypass the copy protection mechanism that these discs use and programs such as AnyDVD and DVDDab that are widely available on the Internet can do exactly this. In many countries and cases this act alone is enough to violate the law. However the chances of an individual being sued for personal viewing of his or her own legally purchased discs are remote. DRM is designed to stop mass piracy and the sharing of files with strangers via the Internet and these are the cases which have been prosecuted.
Only professional applications can successfully perform the balancing act between picture quality and file size. This is because each parameter can be controlled manually. At first glance these tools seem intimidating. You will quickly get the hang of them though. We have chosen the best program in its class, MeMUI to show you how easy it is to copy films as MKV files from a Blu-ray discs and then to add suitable audio tracks.
MeGUI gives you full control over the final file’s quality. To ensure that it runs without any problems you must prepare your PC. Install the following codecs as well as script collections AviSynth, ffdshow and NeroAAC. You will also need the tool eac3to to extract audio tracks.
MeGUI needs no installation but it is a good idea to apply all available updates and download all the recommended add on tools. MeGUI will also throw up an error related to the NeroAAC codec which is a known issues. You need to manually specify the path to this codec under option | setting | External program setting for achieving the optimum video quality we shall select the versatile MKV container format though MP4 will also do in case your devices do not support MKV video.
1. FINDING THE FILM FILE after copying the Blu ray data onto your hard disk you will need to find the film stream. You can identify it by its file size because most other the files are only a few MB each while the film is about 30 GB in a single file.
2. LOADING THE FILM IN MeGUI in the program click tool-AVS script creator and select the film file in the video input field. You can check the original resolution of the film under input DAR.
3. CUTTING now enable the checkbox crop and select auto crop so that any automatically created black letterbox bars are removed.
4. REDUCING THE RESOLUTION if you want to scale the resolution down to 720p to save space then compare the resolution under input DAR with the table alongside and side. Under resize enter the pixel values given against 720p videos in the table and select suggest resolution.
5. OPTIMIZING COMPRESSION under the script tab you can extend the specified AviSynth script with ConvertoYV12 (). This command adjusts the color space and improves compression. Saving completes the video setting for the time being. Other script are available online to make the use of this professional software more easy.
6. FINDING THE AUDIO TRACK open the Windows prompt by typing cmd.exe in the start menu of Windows 7 and by then pressing enter. Navigate to the eac3to folder for example cd C:\Downloads\eac3t\, with the command cd. You can determine the audio tracks with eac3to c:\video.m2ts.
7. SAVING INDIVIDUAL SOUND TRACKS the program lists the audio tracks in a numbered sequence. In our example we have selected the English AC3 track i.e number 3. You can save the audio file with the command 3:c:\video path\English.ac3. if you want to have several audio languages in your MKV file later repeat the process for the other tracks.
8. LOADING THE AVISYNTH SCRIPT in order for MeAVI to use the video profile created in point 5 load it in the main menu under aviSynth Script.
9. DETERMINING THE VIDEO CONTAINER select the MKV container under file format. In case your devices do not support MKV you can use the MP4 container instead.
10. CALCULATING THE FILE SIZE you have now completed most of the setting it’s now time for fine tuning where you can also define the size of the output file. For this open the Bitrate Calculator under tools and load the audio file first.
11. DEFINING BIT RATE finding the right bit rate is an art in itself. If you select very fe bits per second the video is small but the picture quality drops drastically this will then have not live up to its HD tag. If the bit rate is too high the size of the file increases even though the picture quality will not improved beyond a certain point. Experience tells us that a bit rate of 4000 to 8000 kbps is good for a 720p video while 8000 to 14000 kbps suits 1080p better. In the example we have decided to use a bit rate of 8000 to prioritize quality over file size. The film is therefore approximately 7.65 GB in size still a good value for a 120 minute video in excellent HD quality.
12. OPTIMIZING THE ENCODER select the point x264 scratchpad under encored setting in the main menu of MeGUI and click config. Professional can then manually define all decoder settings. However inexperienced users are better off adjusting the default settings using the slide control. You will get the optimum picture quality with the very slow setting but the process takes very long to complete. On our test system MeGUI took about nine hours for a 90 minute film. If you are in a hurry you can get a good enough result with the medium setting. Do not slide the control further as this will deteriorate the quality considerably.
13. CREATING AN MKV since you have made all the setting now it is time to create the MKV file. To do so click enqueue in the main menu and start encoding under the queue teb by clicking start.
14. LINKING AUDIO AND VIDEO the MKV file is now ready but there is no audio track. To integrate the AC3 file created earlier with the MKV container click tools| Muxer| MKV Muxer in the main menu and select both files. Then click Queue and again Queue | start in the main menu. And you are done! Your film with the best audio and picture quality is now readily available as a digital file and you can transfer it to any device you choose. Long journeys need not be so boring anymore.
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