Blu-Ray/MKV to m-HD

[Nguyen Trung Hoa]

OK before you go any further let me say thank you to Cave Man for this wonderful guide, secondly in HandBrake all you have to do is change it from MP4/M4V to MKV if you are intending to use this to make an MKV and lastly this is mainly for creating a 720p file I suggest you use Average bitrate instead of Constant quality.

Getting Blu-ray rips to the Apple TV is getting easier. If you're interested, this guide should help you get going. It's not cheap, but it's pretty easy to do. First, the list of items that you need:

Materials:

1. An Intel Mac or any Windows PC
2. An install of Windows XP or Vista
3. A Blu-ray drive (I have Sony's SATA drive retail package[size=85]1[/size] in a Vantec USB2 enclosure[size=85]2[/size])
4. AnyDVD HD for backing up your Blu-ray discs to a hard drive - about US$100[size=85]3[/size]
5. TSmuxer (free Windows app)[size=85]4[/size]
6. Handbrake 0.9.3 (free Mac/Windows app)[size=85]5[/size]
7. Lots and lots of hard drive space

Methods (If you are converting an MKV go to step 4):
1. Boot into Windows (using Boot Camp on Mac) and install AnyDVD HD. Connect your Blu-ray drive, insert a disc, and after a few seconds you should be able to rip a backup of your BD from the drive to your hard disk. This can take 35-40 gb. I have a 500 gb USB2/FW400 drive initialized as NTFS for this purpose.

2. After ripping, open the ripped Streams folder to identify the largest file - this is the movie. Note that some discs have the movie partitioned into separate streams (e.g., Ratattouile, Meet the Robinsons). For these movies, you need to install BDinfo to find the playlist for the movie. Once identified, open this playlist in tsmuxer (next step).

3. Launch tsmuxer and add the m2ts movie or playlist file. Identify the tracks of interest, which should be 1080p video and audio of your preferred language. Uncheck all other files. If the audio is in True-HD or DTS-HD, click on that track to highlight it and choose the option to extract these to either AC3 or DTS. Set the file output to m2ts, then save it to your Windows NTFS drive.

4. Launch Handbrake 0.9.3 and try to open the file. HB is very good, but it still has trouble with some files. If the audio is in AC3 Dolby Digital, you shouldn't have any problems (but ymmv). If HB has difficulty opening the file created by tsmuxer, try opening the original m2ts file to see if HB can handle it. I have one movie, War, that HB could only open from the original file, even though it has H.264 video and AC3 audio.

5. When it opens the file, click on the Apple TV preset, then modify the following settings to:

A. Leave the video set to Constant quality of 59% (but if that doesn't work, Change the video Quality to Average bit rate of 5,000 to 6,000 kbps) also for conversion to MKV click format and change it to MKV (Also make sure you say the extension at the end of the output file name to MKV :) ).

B. Under Picture change Anamorphic to "none", check Keep aspect ratio, and increase to 1280 wide by whatever tall (to preserve aspect ratio).

C. Select the Audio & Subtitles tab and choose the AC3 option for AAC DPLII for the first track and AC3 passthrough for the second track. If HB reads the DTS track, your option will only be AAC DPLII.

(Note: If you want 1080p, leave the quality at 59% and set the width to 1920. Of course, this will not play on the Apple TV, but it will play in Plex and Quicktime/Front Row on a Mac).

6. Give the file a destination on your OS X volume. Let it start and run! The generated file will be an MPEG-4 H.264 as an m4v. My 3.2 gHz quad core hackintosh does a 720p movie in about 2.5 hours (final size of 5-6 gb).

If you want to know the file formats of the Blu-ray video (H.264 [AVC], MPEG-2 or VC-1) and audio (True-HD, DTS-HD, DD or DTS)[size=85]6[/size].

Links:
1. Sony's SATA Blu-ray drive

Code:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827131054

2. Vantec USB2 enclosure

Code:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817392021

3. AnyDVD HD

Code:

http://www.slysoft.com/en/anydvdhd.html

4. TSMuxer

Code:

http://www.smlabs.net/tsmuxer_en.html

5. HandBrake 0.9.3

Code:

http://handbrake.fr/?article=download

6. File Formats on Blu-ray

Code:

http://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=3338

Thank you for reading and I hope you like the guide.