HandBrake... and soft subtitles... now possible

I'm posting this because, as some folks know, my Wife is deaf while I am not. It's something we deal with, but I thought this tidbit of info could be relevant to someone else, perhaps another couple that's hearing/deaf as we are.

One of the biggest "issues" for us is that because the Wife is deaf, watching TV or movies can be a bit of a chore. I, being an audio-video enthusiast since birth basically, and her not having a clue (it's not a negative, it's just how she is) about sound or why it's so important to someone like myself can get in the way sometimes of the enjoyment.

I've been wanting to start putting together a media center style setup for us for a very long time, but until Windows 7 happened along, I just wasn't interested in putting in the time required to convert our rather large retail DVD collection (over 1,100) to content suitable for storage on a hard drive and maintain a level of quality that's nearly transparent while also having subtitles or even closed captions in the resulting files, in a soft format that I can enabled or disable at will - and do all this with a minimum of effort and hassles, and most importantly, a hope that I can/could do it all with just one application.

And now I can...

The intention, the objective I suppose, is to use h.264 encoding (using HandBrake for its native x264 encoding ability) and keep that near transparent quality - which isn't tough considering I'm just using retail DVD content to start with, not the best quality as we all know. But I'm not about to go start collecting 1,100+ movies all over again just because they're on Blu-ray or even the much much cheaper HD DVD that's still available.

So, I've been hoping to do all this with one application for the longest time and never had much luck with it: most every application out there that can convert DVD content directly to an MKV file (yes, it's a container, and a wonderful magical one at that) but compressed. I'm aware of MakeMKV and what it can do, but in the end the result is basically the original file - which is huge and a waste of space, even with huge hard drives available, it's still a shitload of wasted space, period. And yes, in the process it retains the soft subs - meaning I can enable/disable them as required (I find them a distraction when I watch, so when I watch stuff alone they're off, but on for the Wife when we watch together or her by herself, obviously).

Now, finally, after all this time, someone (or I should say a group of someones, the developers) have pulled off some magic and the latest svn snapshot release of HandBrake (svn 2592, read more about it in this thread at the HandBrake forums: http://forum.handbrake.fr/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=11201) can now produce MKV (and MP4) files that have soft subs in them, whichever you choose (all if you want). This is a great day, I tell ya...

I did a test encode of a single chapter (#4) from the retail DVD "Jumper" and was extremely pleased with the output:



Now, this is important to me because prior to this I had to do these steps:

- Rip the DVD content to the drive
- Use HandBrake 0.9.3 (the current stable regular release) to crunch the main movie down to an MKV file using the High Profile preset (1800 Kbps, h.264/x264 encoding, downconvert the AC3 track to AAC stereo 48 kHz/160Kbps)
- When that's done, use VobSub to rip the subtitles out to workable files
- Use mkvtoolnix to remux the .srt or .cc file back into the HandBrake-created MKV file
- Test it to make sure the subs were soft and synced
- Done

Complicated, but I did it for a few of her Harry Potter movies she loves so we could safely store the DVDs and she can watch 'em off her drive anytime.

Now, that process is reduced to just two steps:

- Rip the DVD content to the drive
- Use HandBrake svn 2592 to crunch the main movie down, same settings as above, but select the English subtitle track or the closed captions as those are preferred - subs only show dialogue whereas closed captions actually show events, noises, actions happening off-screen, etc
- Done

So much easier, I swear. It took a long time to get to this point but, it was worth the wait I suppose. Now I'll be ripping a lot of DVDs today then setting up a batch encode for later on when I'm asleep and get a few done each day. It'll be a long process, sure, but... it's a helluvalot easier using just one application to do this than the steps I had to go through before.

Just thought I'd pass the info along to those out there, as I said it might help someone else, and if it does, it was worth the time to type this up. For those that might wonder why I dump the AC3 soundtrack, there's two primary reasons:

1) I don't have a full blown home theater setup, just a Klipsch 2.1 rig for myself, as well as some nice headphones for when I watch myself, so I/we have no need for all that excess and I don't intend to be building a full blown home theater for years (we still survive in a studio apartment till we decide to get a real home I guess), and...

2) The end result gives me good quality audio at higher than average bitrates (160 over 128) and the MKV file is just that much smaller because of it. The target for most movies is just under a gigabyte, actually - Jumper is a 1 hour 25 minute movie (I left the 4 mins of end credits out) and crunched to 1.21GB which is still a bit large for me. Most likely I'll go back and redo the encode at 1250 Kbps and 1500 Kbps and decide on which will end up being my final "default" encoding bitrate to keep most 1.5 hour movies to about 1GB or less - on a 1TB drive, that's like 850 movies so... quite a bit.

I'll always have the originals if I do get myself a proper 5.1 setup in the future, and re-encoding will only take an hour or two if I feel the need...

Good luck...

ps
One of the HandBrake developers stated that there could be a new snapshot release this weekend, so... I hope it's true... just that much closer to HandBrake 0.9.4...

Great news. I don't know what it is about VobSub, but in the little time I used it I quickly realized what an immense pain in the ass it was.

I've been wanting to rip my DVD collection with soft subs and had a go at doing one or two before I got fed up with the level of complication. Guess I'll have to get to work when 0.9.4 is out.

Exactly the same reason I've been putting it off for so long: the complications and hassles. But, that's all covered now with the one app I had hoped would end up being the one to make it all possible, HandBrake. It's just so full of win it's not even funny...

Great news! Thx Joe. My HTPC build is going to commence shortly and this will certainly come in handy.

Just make sure the "Burned In" checkbox isn't selected or... they'll burn in, of course. But remove the subs that get chosen automagically and then re-add the one(s) you specifically want, in the order you want... done a few encodes today, so far so good, love the results.

Very good news and thanks for the write-up. Now the the devs would only work on a DTS passthrough option...

Looks like that's on the roadmap, yep...

"DTS pass-through (in MKV)"

*does happy dance*

I have a stack of DVD's that I have yet to re-encode for that very reason.

The "promised" updated svn snapshot build was released earlier, get more info and the build here:

http://forum.handbrake.fr/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=12009

Now has .srt import ability too, very useful in some situations - there are plenty of DVDs out there that don't have subs or closed captioning but I can locate .srt files on the Net, as oddly as that seems, so I can still get 'em in the resulting output files for the Wife.

Looks like WMV import is working on Windows now as well, but it's a bit broken at the moment when the output is M4V/MP4. It basically doubles the container length (d'oh). Matroska output works fine.

i downloaded the version above but

to crunch the main movie down to an MKV file using the High Profile preset

Click to expand...

idont have any high profile presets in my menu option..All that shows is Apple / Regular and Legacy..

MrGuvernment said:

i downloaded the version above but



idont have any high profile presets in my menu option..All that shows is Apple / Regular and Legacy..

Click to expand...

How old is the version you are using??

i am using thesnap shot 2773

which doesnt even have the high profile or gaming one on it...

i just ripped a DVD and encoding in x264 with %100 quality and got an 18G file..lol

That's what happens when you transcode from a lossy format to a lossless one...

ahh.. ya i am trying to convert my DVD's to mkv as it should comress better as i want to get a small size but keep the dvd quality?

MrGuvernment said:

ahh.. ya i am trying to convert my DVD's to mkv as it should comress better as i want to get a small size but keep the dvd quality?

Click to expand...

Since you don't have the preset, I'll help you out.

In the Video tab, select H264, 2 Pass Encoding, Turbo First Pass, and a 2000Kbps average bitrate. In the Advanced tab, paste this into the text box at the bottom and hit Enter:

trying that out now!

it worked, but thinking, is 2000 bitrate good? seems low for DVD since they can come, retail of course, as high as 9.5mb...

Bleh.

Was working on a nice detailed post of doing this but, honestly sometimes I get sick of being so detailed.

With the svn 2773 release (and there's been an update to it to resolve bugs some people were having, PM me for it if you require it as it's tough as hell to find on the actual HandBrake forum), things are different now.

The command line stuff simply isn't required anymore, really. The "new" CRF profiles in the svn give two pass quality with a single pass, cutting the encoding time down dramatically and still offering outstanding quality using x264.

It's as simple as picking your source, selecting High Profile, ensuring you choose MKV as the container, picking the audio tracks you want, subs if you want 'em, chapter markers, then hitting Start, really. I took Con Air just earlier tonight and I've now got an MKV file that's about 900MB in size, looks exactly the same, has just the English audio because I downconvert to stereo AAC 48kHz/160Kbps because I don't need the rest - this gives me big savings on the end result in terms of file size. A typical 5.1 soundtrack is like 400MB, and some discs have multiple soundtracks which are a waste of space. I add the English subs/captions for the Wife and I'm done.

Took about 2 hours for the entire process (and I was using this PC the whole time for other stuff), and the movie itself is 1:55:17 so, slightly faster than real-time encoding on this. HandBrake showed about 26.5 fps as the average encoding rate on this Core 2 Duo E7300 with DDR2 533/3/3/3/9.

No muss, no fuss, and I can queue up a bunch of flicks on the drive in the same manner and just let 'em go while I'm away from the machine or sleeping and get slightly better encoding times.

Command lines... yuck. If you're using HandBrake, that stuff is passe...

MrGuvernment: Pick one of your favorite DVDs, pick a chapter on that DVD that stands out for picture sharpness, clarity, action, etc. Then do a test encode using the settings I just mentioned of just that one chapter and don't muck with the command line at all. When it's done, compare the original chapter content with the encoded content and judge for yourself. Considering how good the CRF profile now works, and considering how much time it can save for DVD transcodes, I think you'll find it's far more than adequate and very efficient.

Edit:
Thought about it and realized since you're dealing with DVDs primarily and this bug fix is meant to ensure the accurate scanning of VOBs (which is what the svn 2773 is having some issues with), here's the forum posting about it:

http://forum.handbrake.fr/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=12021

The new patched .exe is available from the link in the 3rd to last post, by s55. Grab it and drop it into the HandBrake directory to overwrite the original svn 2773 exe. As noted, you'll know you're running the newer one because it'll say "SVN 2773 - TEST RELEASE 1" on the toolbar when the app is running.

Good luck...

will check out that link, i used the above suggestions since my handbrake doesnt have a hi def preset on it (i tried updating the presets even) i change my bitrate to 3000 but the movis came out blocky

will play around with it some more tonight, i may use subs as well since my girl friends mom has trouble with some english movies.

All I'll say is this: if you use that svn build (the bug fixed one I linked to in the post above), and you choose the settings I mentioned (which are the recommended ones by the HandBrake developers now, the CRF stuff makes things significantly easier), and it still looks blocky then something is wrong with your source material or your copy of HandBrake, somewhere.

ya, retail dvd ripped with AnyDVDHD, looks fine when i play the raw files so will make sure i get the 773 build tonight and give it another go!

Just for the record, the svn 2773 "fixed" one looks like this:



As noted, it now does have just the two Regular presets: Normal (which I think can provide baseline h.264 output) and High Profile, which results in what's shown under the Video tab.