Blu-ray disks hold high definition copies of movies. At 1080p, they have more than 4 times as many pixels as DVD’s 480p. Now there are UHD (or 4K) disks which promise 2160p, but are still expensive and most people can’t see the difference on their TV. I have been buying a lot Blu-rays the last couple of years, hundreds of them now. Many of them come with a digital HD copy that you can get by redeeming a code on a piece of paper in the case. The movie is then available to you to watch and sometimes download through several different services. This is a good deal because you can also buy digital copies of movies, but they often cost more than the Blu-ray. But maybe half of the Blu-rays I have bought did not include a digital copy. Sometimes you can buy a digital copy of a Blu-ray you own through one of the services, Vudu, for $2 (you take a picture of the UPC to prove you have the disk and GPS proves you are at home), which I have done with about 50 movies. But I still have about 100 Blu-rays with no digital and no Vudu copy available.
I decided I could make my own digital copies of my Blu-rays if I got a Blu-ray drive. Now that I have so many titles, it makes a lot of sense since it lowers the cost per movie. Vudu makes it easy to watch movies stored on their site as long as you have internet access plus you can share your account so other people can watch. A Vudu app is built into most smart TVs, including mine and is on my Blu-ray player as well as my Amazon Fire stick. It is harder to play iTunes movies, but iTunes lets you import home-made videos and load them to an iPad which is my main use for digital copies. I could also watch them on my phone or laptop, but the resolution would be wasted on those. At home I can watch homemade digital copies on the Fire stick using Plex. I could change the settings on Plex to allow me to watch movies on the go, but I don’t have a need for that.
I found a program called MakeMKV that will extract the movie file off of a Blu-ray. When I was using Handbrake to convert DVDs I had to get a special helper file that would allow that, but it was nice because Handbrake would do everything. Now I have to generate a 20-40 GB MKV file with MakeMKV and then compress that into a MP4 file using Handbrake. A Blu-ray has a lot of files on it, but the movie is usually the biggest one, so it was no trouble identifying the correct file and the software and the new drive worked fine. It takes about an hour to get the file and copy it to my hard drive (it reads at twice the usual Blu-ray speed). Some programs like VLC player will play mkv files directly, but to make them easier to handle and more compatible, you need to convert them in Handbrake.
I found a good tutorial to HandBrake settings at rokoding.com. It was written with Roku devices in mind, but produces a file that can be used by almost any device. One of the key settings is encoder optimizer. The tutorial recommends “slow” as the best balance between encoding speed and the time the computer spends converting the file. I tried “slower,” but that takes about 12 hours to do one movie. Supposedly taking all of that time gives better quality video and a smaller file size. But I really want to cut the time down to 8 hours or so so that I could rip a movie while I sleep or I am at work (“slow” takes 8 hours or so). I could use both of my laptops which might let me do 4 movies a day. Another setting is quality which affects file size. They recommend a setting of 20-22 for Blu-rays, with 22 being lower quality and smaller file size. I did the same movie using 21 and then 22 and reduced the resulting file size from 6,384 MB to 5,634 MB, about 12%.
After trying a few movies, the file size runs 4-12 GB for a regular length movie. The Graduate, which runs less than two hours, weighed in at 10.5 GB, maybe because the film has a lot of grain, which the encoder thinks is rapidly changing fine detail. There is a “grain” video encoding setting that might help with that (it did not: larger file size and took longer to encode). The problem with a file size that large is it won’t fit on my iPad which only has maybe 10 GB of room available for videos.
Another problem with these big files is bandwidth over my WiFi network. Watching one movie on Plex in my front room I was getting errors where it said it could not maintain the signal. I tried repositioning the Fire stick to get a “very good” signal instead of just “good,” but I don’t think that will always work. It is possible to have the Plex server downgrade the file before transmitting it, but then what am I accomplishing?
The other issue with all of this is where to store everything. I have about 100 movies I would like to rip, so I need maybe 1 TB of space. I have an empty Seagate 2 TB external drive that used to be connected to my Dish DVR and it will hold everything, but it doesn’t get along with my Western Digital MyCloud drive which has a USB port to allow you to add a hard drive. However my 500 GB portable drive hooks up to it no problem (also the bandwidth from that little drive is terrible as data goes from that drive through the MyCloud, the router, to my laptop Plex server, then back to the router and out to WiFi). If I’m going to use Plex as a household media server, it isn’t like the files have to be on a NAS like the MyCloud anyway so I guess I could connect the 2 TB drive to the laptop I use as a desktop, but I would rather not have to have that drive connected to the laptop all the time.
Follow up:
After doing some math and deleting some unnecessary files, I think I can fit all the movies and even all of my Twilight Zone episodes on the MyCloud drive. I can make some room by deleting or moving a folder with a bunch of digital copies I downloaded from iTunes. It doesn’t take that long to download a movie from iTunes and I don’t think I need a backup of a digital file when I have access to the file on 3 or 4 different online services, plus I have the Blu-ray drive if they ever stop honoring the digital files in my account (I haven’t been ripping Blu-rays if I have a digital copy in HD). I can also move my Downloads folder to the little drive and free up another 100 GB or so. Then I can use my 2 TB external drive to back up the MyCloud. That way the 2 TB drive doesn’t have to be connected all the time to a computer unless the transfer speed of the MyCloud is a problem (about 10 MB/s, instead of 70 MB/s from the 2 TB drive via USB 3.0).
I’m still not sure why some movies rip to much larger file sizes than others, but I decided to re-rip the biggest offenders, anything over 10 GB. To get those below that threshold, I can rip to 720p instead of 1080p using the “720p fast” setting and then modify the audio to one stereo track and one passthrough with surround. On the stereo track I have been increasing the DRC setting to 2.0 which is supposed to help boost quiet dialogue. I have not been adding a subtitle track and I’m not sure how that works exactly, but I think it would be a good option since every now and then I need to turn on subtitles to make something out. But I am almost done ripping everything and don’t want to do it all again, especially since I have had to get rid of most of the mkv files to have enough room on the 2TB drive I have been using to transfer files from one laptop to another and eventually to the MyCloud.