I’m well aware that I can rip most Blu-rays with MakeMKV and then convert to mp4 with Handbrake; however, the former just rips everything raw from the disk so the file size is humongous and the conversion via Handbrake for just a single file is terribly long and puts a lot of strain on my computer.
I’ve heard that EaseFab LosslessCopy is decent, but they only have a Windows and a Mac version, and I’m unsure how well it’d run under Wine.
I am willing to pay for it, but only as long as it’s not a subscription thing. Has to be a one-time payment.
Does anyone know any decent Blu-ray ripping software that fits these conditions and run well on Linux? Specifically, it would be either Pop!_OS or Linux Mint. (I’m still using Windows because I want to figure out some software alternatives before I do so I’m not caught with my pants down, so to speak.)
Reencoding video will always put a lot of strain on your computer, regardless if it’s Handbrake or some other tool doing the conversion. With that said, it also depends a lot on the settings you use to transcode.
Can you share what video settings you tried in Handbrake?
Ok, so two things stand out.
First, you’re using placebo as your encoder preset. This is slow, stupidly slow.
Searching for some comparisons between the different presets that show how slow it is was more difficult than expected, most people don’t even test this setting. Found one comparison here anyways luckily. The first graph (red line) shows how many fps/second were achieved on average. The fastest preset they tested, veryfast, is 68 times faster than placebo.
For reasonable values I’d use medium or slow, which are still 20 times or 10 times faster with minuscule quality differences. Also see the FFMPEG FAQ on why placebo is stupid.
Now for the second thing. I get why you put 0 as CRF, but that’s not a good idea. You’ll most likely have a bigger file in the end than what you started with.
The bluray itself does not contain enough details to actually need such a low CRF. 17 or 18 is visually lossless, as in you won’t be able to tell the difference with your eyes. For my encodes I use 20 most of the time, as it still more than good enough. Reasonable values, if you want a smaller file size are up to ~28.
TLDR: use slow with CRF 20 as a starting point.
I hope some of this made sense to you and sorry if it comes over as too agressive.
Still, hope this helps you get what you want.
Edit: One more thing I thought about. You can use the hardware encoder in your GPU if you want. However, that will come with worse quality and bigger files than encoding on the CPU. Still something you might want to look at just to compare.
I…uh…feel like a dumbass now. I didn’t know a lot of this. When I first started using Handbrake, a lot of articles I read suggested to use Placebo / CRF 20 if I wanted no loss in quality. I also do this when I rip DVDs and the file sizes and everything have always been perfectly reasonable. Though I suppose maybe that was because DVDs are 480p max typically and those naturally have much smaller file sizes than Blu-rays hold.
I just don’t want a loss in quality, that’s all. :(
Also,
TLDR: use slow with CRF 20 as a starting point.
Thanks. You didn’t come across as agressive to me. :) I appreciate the information. I’m no noob as I’ve been ripping DVDs for years using Handbrake but I am very much a beginner when it comes to ripping Blu-rays, which seem to be a slightly different beast than the former, so I’m glad that everyone is so willing to share tips. :)
