Joe Average
Ad Blocker - Banned
- Joined
- Apr 6, 2008
- Messages
- 15,459
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...
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...
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