How do I move Blu Ray movies to Mezzmo

Four years ago I ripped about a few of my blu ray movies to use with Mezzmo. The wireless connection to my blu ray player couldn't handle the stream, so I ended up not using Mezzmo because the movies were either too choppy or the resolution too blurry. I gave up on that project.

Since then, I have upgraded my home network to 1GB and ran CAT6 to both of my blu ray players. In the last few weeks I've ripped at least 100 Blu rays from my collection to MP4 so that my kids could watch them on their android tablets. After viewing the Mezzmo server via Android, I decided to revisit this project. This week, I am moving Mezzmo to a slightly newer PC with a faster processor in the hopes I will be able to get movies across the network to my blu ray players at full resolution.

I have about 500 blu ray movies, about 900 DVD movies, and at least 50 complete TV show collections in both formats which can have a lot of media. For example, I have Battlestar Galactica on Blu ray - five seasons with 21 discs.


What is the best "workflow" and ripping software to get where I want to go?


I ask about the ripping software because the software I used (Open Blu Ray Ripper) doesn't seem to have gotten updates since early 2015, and failed to rip most of my newer blu ray movies when I was trying to make them available for my kids android devices.

Handbrake might be the best starting place for ripping your Bluray discs. Since you are streaming to Android devices the format of the ripped Bluray should not be an issue, Handbrake outputs to mkv or mp4. Try ripping a Bluray using Handbrake then add it to Mezzmo and see if it streams to a device without issues.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Peter

Handbrake might be the best starting place for ripping your Bluray discs. Since you are streaming to Android devices the format of the ripped Bluray should not be an issue, Handbrake outputs to mkv or mp4. Try ripping a Bluray using Handbrake then add it to Mezzmo and see if it streams to a device without issues.

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My primary target isn't the android tablets, it's two Sony blu ray players. I want to retain as much video quality as possible.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Narnian

Four years ago I ripped about a few of my blu ray movies to use with Mezzmo. The wireless connection to my blu ray player couldn't handle the stream, so I ended up not using Mezzmo because the movies were either too choppy or the resolution too blurry. I gave up on that project.

Since then, I have upgraded my home network to 1GB and ran CAT6 to both of my blu ray players. In the last few weeks I've ripped at least 100 Blu rays from my collection to MP4 so that my kids could watch them on their android tablets. After viewing the Mezzmo server via Android, I decided to revisit this project. This week, I am moving Mezzmo to a slightly newer PC with a faster processor in the hopes I will be able to get movies across the network to my blu ray players at full resolution.

I have about 500 blu ray movies, about 900 DVD movies, and at least 50 complete TV show collections in both formats which can have a lot of media. For example, I have Battlestar Galactica on Blu ray - five seasons with 21 discs.


What is the best "workflow" and ripping software to get where I want to go?


I ask about the ripping software because the software I used (Open Blu Ray Ripper) doesn't seem to have gotten updates since early 2015, and failed to rip most of my newer blu ray movies when I was trying to make them available for my kids android devices.

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There are tons of ways and suggestions to do this. Googling this questions and sorting through forum threads will undoubtedly give you plenty of info. You'll need to decide how much of an investment you want to make in time and money. You also need to decide you OCD you are and if you just want 1:1 rips, if you want to remove foreign subtitles and audio, if you want chapters, embedded art, etc. There is really no one way to do it.

It is really a two-part process:
#1 - Defeating DRM and Copy-Protection
#2 - Actually ripping the disc and/or converting. I hope you understand the difference between re-encoding and re-muxing.

The biggest obstacle is overcoming the DRM since you can't properly rip or convert until this is done. There are only two or three ways of really doing this properly/successfully.

MakeMKV is probably the most popular of the "proven" methods and will combine both steps into 1 task. It defeats the DRM and then rips/remuxes the disc for you.

www.makemkv.com

It is free while it is in Beta...... it has been in Beta for years. You'll just install it, load up your disc(s), choose which tracks/streams you want to keep and it creates a single .mkv file with your desired movie/tv show (hopefully). This would probably be your quickest, cleanest and simplest way. You'll just need to make sure your playback devices won't have issues with the .mkv container or that you end up with streams that aren't compatible. For instance, most Region 1 Blu-Rays (maybe shouldn't assume you are from North America) come with a single English audio track that is in a DTS-HD MA format. Your AVR needs to be able to decode it or the DTS core file. Most AVRs will do that and all Blu-Ray players will since the license is required as part of the BD standard. However, if you are streaming to simpler devices like tablets or phones then it will be a problem. Luckily, if you have Mezzmo setup to transcode incompatible media files you won't really need to worry about it.

At the other end of the spectrum is AnyDVD HD. It pretty much sets the standard for DVD/BD Ripping.

https://redfox.bz/

AnyDVD HD is installed as a driver that sits as an always on driver on your PC (it can be shut off), detects when a DRM protected DVD or Blu-Ray is put into the PC and then automatically strips away the DRM and Copy-Protections (Step 1), leaving you with a Blu-Ray disc that can be ripped or edited any way you choose (Step 2). Their CloneBD tool will probably look and behave similar to "Open Blu-Ray Ripper" that you have used in the past and is made to work in conjunction with AnyDVD HD. As you will notice, you will need to be ready to part with $150-$200 to get setup initially but this is undoubtedly the path that leads to the least amount of frustration after you get over the initial sticker shock. I have a feeling that most people that are facing major ripping projects go with AnyDVD HD and then build their workflow around that. I actually prefer to use AnyDVD Image Ripper ti strip out the DM and then rip the entire BD or DVD to an .iso file that I stick in a Temp folder. When I am ready to rip out the individual Movies or TV Shows I mount the .iso as a Virtual BD using PowerISO or something similar. I just did this with Battlestar Galactica Boxed set that you mentioned. It took up quite a bit of HDD space since each .iso file ran about 40GB. I just ripped all the discs in a season to .iso files and then came back and converted them later. Then I repeated with each season after that. The ripping is the most time consuming since each disc takes 45 minutes to an hour so a lot of it was a day or two of starting a rip, go do something for an hour, come back and start another one, go do something for another hour, etc. That's why I like to rip most or all of them up front because stripping out the individual files and/or converting can often be done in a batch.

That takes us to Step 2.

Peter mentioned Handbrake and that is an excellent choice. If you have ripped all of the discs to .iso, you can mount them, load the mounted .iso files into Handbrake, make your settings and then start the rip/encode. With Handbrake you can set up multiple encodes in the Queue and just let them run for hours or even days if necessary. I like Handbrake because it lets me create multiple audio tracks where a lot of rippers/encoders seem to want to limit me to one.

Getting the proper settings in Handbrake to encode the file is the most challenging part.
On the Picture tab, I just select "Keep Aspect Ratio", "Anamorphic" to <None> and "Cropping" to <Custom> and <0> all the way around
http://i.imgur.com/sacq0lU.jpg

On the Filters tab, "Detelecine" to <Default> and "Decomb" to <Default>, I leave everything else <Off>

On the Video tab:
Video Codec: H.264
Framerate: Same As Source/Variable Framerate
x264 Preset: Medium or Slow
x264 Tune: Film and Fast Decode
H.264 Profile: Main (You could safely use High if all of your devices are less than 2 years old)
H.264 Level: 4.1
Constant Quality: 16 or 18 (Most people will say that 16 is overkill, especially for Blu-Ray and would recommend 20 and maybe 18)
http://i.imgur.com/9oRBFPi.jpg

On the Audio Tab:
With Blu-Rays, I like to create a 2-channel .aac track from the DTS-HD MA track that is the default audio track. That way it should playback on almost anything without re-encoding. I usually also create a Dolby Digital 5.1 channel track as well as Passthrough the DTS-HD track and any English .pgs (subtitle) tracks.
http://i.imgur.com/JHgobut.jpg

I will usually add any English Subtitles from the Subtitle Tab, too.

Then hit Start or Add to Queue if something is already running.

With these settings, I can usually get an .mkv file of a movie that is about 60-70% as large as the original without any imperceptible degradation in image quality. However, with BSG and now with The Wire I have been ending up with files that are about 20-30% larger than the original so I just rip out the original files by loading the correct BD Playlist into MKVToolnix and then just remuxing. That leaves me without my beloved aac track but that's a little more in depth. Let me know if you want more on that process.

There are lots of differing ideas and opinions on this stuff. Try this article if you want some more insight:
https://mattgadient.com/2013/06/12/a...ndbrake-0-9-9/

Alternatively, if you wanted something quicker but not re-encoded, you could load the BD Playlist into MKVToolnix, make your selections and then just remux. This assumes that you have AnyDVD HD running in the background. It's a real similar process to just using MakeMKV in the first place.

Anyway, as you'll discover it isn't really a clean or easy process. I haven't even touched on things like Cinavia and Obfuscated Playlists (this is were AnyDVD HD really shines). Since it seems like you are leaning more towards re-muxing than re-encdoing, I would just start with MakeMKV and see how things work out. You may end up graduating to some other tools later.

This thread from AVSForum is a great jumping off point:
http://www.avsforum.com/forum/39-net...u-rays-ii.html

Some other websites to explore:
kodi.tv
www.videohelp.com

If you go the AnyDVD route:
https://forum.redfox.bz/

Other Tools:
http://www.videohelp.com/software/MKVtoolnix
http://www.dvdfab.cn/ (Their PassKey program is really similar to AnyDVD HD and I keep a subcription as a backup)
http://wincdemu.sysprogs.org/ (Useful for mounting iso images)

That has to be about one of the most thorough answers I've ever gotten Smitbret. I really appreciate the effort. Not only is it a good detailed answer, but you dealt precisely with the questions I've posed.

I'm in California. I don't know the difference between re-encoding and remixing, so I guess I need to go research that one.

I've used MakeMKV several times in the last few weeks but I often found myself lost with the folder structure it created. Sometimes it would chop the main movie into three or four parts and I wouldn't know how to put them together as one file, assuming I could figure out which parts were supposed to be connected. I completely gave up on Alvin and the Chipmunks: RoadChip as it chopped the movie into about eight sections and none of them seemed to start where the previous one ended. I ripped the DVD instead.

If I put the entire folder structure created by MakeMKV on my NAS, would Mezzmo know what to do with it?

Open Blu Ray Ripper was only $30 when I bought it, but the company works with an ala carte model. I originally purchased Open DVD Cloner ($40) then upgraded it several times ($20 each time) then purchased Open Blu Ray Cloner ($50) which included Blu Ray Ripper, then Open DVD ripper($30), and then upgraded Open Blu Ray Ripper ($30). I've probably spent at least $250 on it over the years. It used to be an amazing suite of tools, but they seem to have focused their energy elsewhere as none of those software titles have received any updates in a while. The problem I just ran into was that the latest version of Blu Ray Ripper couldn't get past the DRM on at least half the titles I attempted. All that to say that spending $150 - $200 on AnyDVD is something I'm seriously considering, seeing as how I've easily spent that much on the Open software packages over the last dozen years or so.

I've used handbrake a lot for converting my old VHS captures to a format my kids android tablets could read. I didn't realize it could do what you outlined. I haven't scratched the surface of it's abilities. I'm going to read through your post and your links a few times then give the MakeMKV / Handbrake route a try. If I can't make sense of it I'll probably try AnyDVD. Alternatively, perhaps I can use MakeMKV with Open Blu Ray Ripper.

While I don't want to waste drive space, I'm not opposed to going with 1:1 rips if Mezzmo can transcode the MKV successfully. Drive space is getting less expensive every year. 5TB of storage is only $130 right now. I have room on my home infrastructure to add another seven drives. Right now I have at least 7TB free. Between now and June I think I could squeeze three or four more drives into my budget.

Since my primary goal is to stream my movies to my blu ray players vie Mezzmo, and I'm not opposed to increasing my hard drive storage to meet the demand, but I think I need to read all your links before I get too much further.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Narnian

That has to be about one of the most thorough answers I've ever gotten Smitbret. I really appreciate the effort. Not only is it a good detailed answer, but you dealt precisely with the questions I've posed.

I'm in California. I don't know the difference between re-encoding and remixing, so I guess I need to go research that one.

I've used MakeMKV several times in the last few weeks but I often found myself lost with the folder structure it created. Sometimes it would chop the main movie into three or four parts and I wouldn't know how to put them together as one file, assuming I could figure out which parts were supposed to be connected. I completely gave up on Alvin and the Chipmunks: RoadChip as it chopped the movie into about eight sections and none of them seemed to start where the previous one ended. I ripped the DVD instead.

If I put the entire folder structure created by MakeMKV on my NAS, would Mezzmo know what to do with it?

Open Blu Ray Ripper was only $30 when I bought it, but the company works with an ala carte model. I originally purchased Open DVD Cloner ($40) then upgraded it several times ($20 each time) then purchased Open Blu Ray Cloner ($50) which included Blu Ray Ripper, then Open DVD ripper($30), and then upgraded Open Blu Ray Ripper ($30). I've probably spent at least $250 on it over the years. It used to be an amazing suite of tools, but they seem to have focused their energy elsewhere as none of those software titles have received any updates in a while. The problem I just ran into was that the latest version of Blu Ray Ripper couldn't get past the DRM on at least half the titles I attempted. All that to say that spending $150 - $200 on AnyDVD is something I'm seriously considering, seeing as how I've easily spent that much on the Open software packages over the last dozen years or so.

I've used handbrake a lot for converting my old VHS captures to a format my kids android tablets could read. I didn't realize it could do what you outlined. I haven't scratched the surface of it's abilities. I'm going to read through your post and your links a few times then give the MakeMKV / Handbrake route a try. If I can't make sense of it I'll probably try AnyDVD. Alternatively, perhaps I can use MakeMKV with Open Blu Ray Ripper.

While I don't want to waste drive space, I'm not opposed to going with 1:1 rips if Mezzmo can transcode the MKV successfully. Drive space is getting less expensive every year. 5TB of storage is only $130 right now. I have room on my home infrastructure to add another seven drives. Right now I have at least 7TB free. Between now and June I think I could squeeze three or four more drives into my budget.

Since my primary goal is to stream my movies to my blu ray players vie Mezzmo, and I'm not opposed to increasing my hard drive storage to meet the demand, but I think I need to read all your links before I get too much further.

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Remuxing is what MakeMKV does. It just takes the original files, let's you remove and/or add streams and then repackage everything in a new container. It doesn't change the quality of the individual streams and is generally much faster. Ripping the files from the original disc is actually a form of remuxing. You mentioned CPU speed and the quality of the PC. Remuxing speed should pretty much be the same whether it is a computer that is 6 years old or purchased brand new yesterday since it is just moving information from one spot to another.

Re-encoding is what Handbrake does. It takes the original file and then runs the streams through and makes actual changes to the streams, usually shrinking them. It takes much, much longer. This is also where CPU speed (and often GPU speed) can make a huge difference in speed.

Whichever road you choose is up to you. I use a mix but like you said, HDD space is cheap. That's why I use RF factors of 16-18 because it generally gives me quality that is comparable to the original. I will often check the encode once it is about 20% complete or higher and do the math to get an idea of how big the Destination file is going to be and if I don't think I am going to get a space savings of 25% or more then I will usually just abort the job and just go the remuxing route. Like I said, I had that problem with the Battlestar Galactica Blu-Rays. Each episode ended up at 12+ GB when I re-encoded at RF 18. So, I demuxed them using another tool called TsMuxer, created an .aac and multi-channel .ac3 file (as I showed above) using MeGUI and then just remuxed with MKVToolnix. Episode sizes were 7-10GB that way. I have noticed that re-encoding is particularly pointless when the original video is really noisy/grainy and especially when the video is VC-1 instead of AVC/h264, like several of the BSG episodes, i.e.:
http://i.imgur.com/zyDKwCb.jpg

The movie "300" had the same issue.

On the other side of the coin, "Godzilla (2014)" went from 22GB to a little over 8GB. I was so startled by the size that I re-encoded again at a higher RF and it still came back under 9GB. You just never know. There are other ways to save size using the Advanced Options and a 2-Pass Encode but to get really aggressive an maintain quality requires a huge amount of CPU power and time. I got really crazy with some settings to re encode "The Dark Knight" Blu-Ray and it took 28 hours to re-encode with an AMD FX-6100. As storage costs have gone down, I pretty much have abandoned the Advanced Settings and just gone with the one-pass RF 16 or 18.

You said you were having trouble with Alvin and the Chipmunks. I am not sure how you were setting things up because MakeMKV should just give you a single .mkv file with the complete movie in it. Are you ripping from the Blu-Rays playlist or trying to dig out the .m2ts file? The best way is to use playlists:
https://www.dvd-guides.com/guides/bl...blu-ray-to-mkv

With the way things are chopped up now and how they redundantly use portions of the video for different versions of the film, it's not as straight forward as DVD ripping. Use BDinfo to find the playlist you want and rip that or load that playlist into Handbrake for to re-encode.

The next thing you may run into is Playlist Obfuscation. As a way to make pirating more difficult, some BD makers have created this method of frustrating a would-be disc copier. When you load a regular Blu-ray into BDInfo you will get one or two playlists that are obviously the movie you want. If you load a Blu-Ray with Playlist Obfuscation there will be dozens or even hundreds of potential playlists and only one or two are authentic. The rest are dummy playlists and you won't know it until you play the video back and the movie's scenes are are out of order. You can usually discover the correct playlist by Googling the title and someone somewhere will have the answer. The redfox.bz forum is the best I have found for finding this info. The other solution is using AnyDVD HD. When you load a BD with Obfuscation, AnyDVD HD phones home and finds the correct playlist. It will then alert you in the info window which playlist is correct. You can also use AnyDVD HD's SpeedMenu feature in conjunction with Cyberlink PowerDVD to find the correct playlist as it will display the correct playlist on the customized SpeedMenu instead of the normal Menu.

That takes you to TV shows. When there are multiple episodes on a single disc, the correct playlists are usually ordered 800, 801, 802, 803, etc. However, they will occasionally mix it up by making episode 1 correspond to playlist 802 and episode 2 is playlist 803 but episode 3 is playlist 800, for example. I don't run in to this alot but it is annoying. I have found that the only real fool proof method for me is to load each disc up in Cyberlink or VLC and write down the duration along with the episode name. That way when I load the playlist into my ripping or encoding software I can match the duration with the episode title.

Finally, since you are playing back on Blu-Ray players you might need to know about Cinavia. Check your Blu-Rays and see if you find the Cinavia logo on any of them:
http://i.imgur.com/3n0yOkz.jpg

If you see it on the cover then you won't be able to play it back on your Blu-Ray player. No matter what someone may claim, there is no real workaround for this. If you rip the Blu-Ray and then play it back on a Cinavia licensed player, the audio will drop out between 10-20 minutes of playback and you will get an onscreen warning about Cinavia protection:
http://i.imgur.com/tU2rnUh.jpg

All Blu-Ray players that have been manufactured since February 2011 are required to support Cinavia. There are some workarounds like completely re-encoding the audio but I have yet to hear an example that doesn't leave your audio tracks sounding terrible and distorted. You can compare your Blu-Rays to this list:
http://www.cinexhd2.com/cinexdb/

I hope I haven't muddied the water too much. Let me know if you get stuck or need some further input.

Incidentally, Mezzmo supports .iso files. You could just rip your Blu-Rays to an .iso using AnyDVD Image Ripper and just let Mezzmo make playlists out of it. It is not as pretty as ripping the individual tracks but definitely works. Then you can kind of skip everything.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by smitbret

Remuxing is what MakeMKV does. It just takes the original files, let's you remove and/or add streams and then repackage everything in a new container. It doesn't change the quality of the individual streams and is generally much faster. Ripping the files from the original disc is actually a form of remuxing. You mentioned CPU speed and the quality of the PC. Remuxing speed should pretty much be the same whether it is a computer that is 6 years old or purchased brand new yesterday since it is just moving information from one spot to another.

Re-encoding is what Handbrake does. It takes the original file and then runs the streams through and makes actual changes to the streams, usually shrinking them. It takes much, much longer. This is also where CPU speed (and often GPU speed) can make a huge difference in speed.

Whichever road you choose is up to you. I use a mix but like you said, HDD space is cheap. That's why I use RF factors of 16-18 because it generally gives me quality that is comparable to the original. I will often check the encode once it is about 20% complete or higher and do the math to get an idea of how big the Destination file is going to be and if I don't think I am going to get a space savings of 25% or more then I will usually just abort the job and just go the remuxing route. Like I said, I had that problem with the Battlestar Galactica Blu-Rays. Each episode ended up at 12+ GB when I re-encoded at RF 18. So, I demuxed them using another tool called TsMuxer, created an .aac and multi-channel .ac3 file (as I showed above) using MeGUI and then just remuxed with MKVToolnix. Episode sizes were 7-10GB that way. I have noticed that re-encoding is particularly pointless when the original video is really noisy/grainy and especially when the video is VC-1 instead of AVC/h264, like several of the BSG episodes, i.e.:
http://i.imgur.com/zyDKwCb.jpg

The movie "300" had the same issue.

On the other side of the coin, "Godzilla (2014)" went from 22GB to a little over 8GB. I was so startled by the size that I re-encoded again at a higher RF and it still came back under 9GB. You just never know. There are other ways to save size using the Advanced Options and a 2-Pass Encode but to get really aggressive an maintain quality requires a huge amount of CPU power and time. I got really crazy with some settings to re encode "The Dark Knight" Blu-Ray and it took 28 hours to re-encode with an AMD FX-6100. As storage costs have gone down, I pretty much have abandoned the Advanced Settings and just gone with the one-pass RF 16 or 18.

You said you were having trouble with Alvin and the Chipmunks. I am not sure how you were setting things up because MakeMKV should just give you a single .mkv file with the complete movie in it. Are you ripping from the Blu-Rays playlist or trying to dig out the .m2ts file? The best way is to use playlists:
https://www.dvd-guides.com/guides/bl...blu-ray-to-mkv

With the way things are chopped up now and how they redundantly use portions of the video for different versions of the film, it's not as straight forward as DVD ripping. Use BDinfo to find the playlist you want and rip that or load that playlist into Handbrake for to re-encode.

The next thing you may run into is Playlist Obfuscation. As a way to make pirating more difficult, some BD makers have created this method of frustrating a would-be disc copier. When you load a regular Blu-ray into BDInfo you will get one or two playlists that are obviously the movie you want. If you load a Blu-Ray with Playlist Obfuscation there will be dozens or even hundreds of potential playlists and only one or two are authentic. The rest are dummy playlists and you won't know it until you play the video back and the movie's scenes are are out of order. You can usually discover the correct playlist by Googling the title and someone somewhere will have the answer. The redfox.bz forum is the best I have found for finding this info. The other solution is using AnyDVD HD. When you load a BD with Obfuscation, AnyDVD HD phones home and finds the correct playlist. It will then alert you in the info window which playlist is correct. You can also use AnyDVD HD's SpeedMenu feature in conjunction with Cyberlink PowerDVD to find the correct playlist as it will display the correct playlist on the customized SpeedMenu instead of the normal Menu.

That takes you to TV shows. When there are multiple episodes on a single disc, the correct playlists are usually ordered 800, 801, 802, 803, etc. However, they will occasionally mix it up by making episode 1 correspond to playlist 802 and episode 2 is playlist 803 but episode 3 is playlist 800, for example. I don't run in to this alot but it is annoying. I have found that the only real fool proof method for me is to load each disc up in Cyberlink or VLC and write down the duration along with the episode name. That way when I load the playlist into my ripping or encoding software I can match the duration with the episode title.

Finally, since you are playing back on Blu-Ray players you might need to know about Cinavia. Check your Blu-Rays and see if you find the Cinavia logo on any of them:
http://i.imgur.com/3n0yOkz.jpg

If you see it on the cover then you won't be able to play it back on your Blu-Ray player. No matter what someone may claim, there is no real workaround for this. If you rip the Blu-Ray and then play it back on a Cinavia licensed player, the audio will drop out between 10-20 minutes of playback and you will get an onscreen warning about Cinavia protection:
http://i.imgur.com/tU2rnUh.jpg

All Blu-Ray players that have been manufactured since February 2011 are required to support Cinavia. There are some workarounds like completely re-encoding the audio but I have yet to hear an example that doesn't leave your audio tracks sounding terrible and distorted. You can compare your Blu-Rays to this list:
http://www.cinexhd2.com/cinexdb/

I hope I haven't muddied the water too much. Let me know if you get stuck or need some further input.

Incidentally, Mezzmo supports .iso files. You could just rip your Blu-Rays to an .iso using AnyDVD Image Ripper and just let Mezzmo make playlists out of it. It is not as pretty as ripping the individual tracks but definitely works. Then you can kind of skip everything.

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I had several AHA! moments in there. Sounds like I ran into the Playlist Obfuscation.

If I go the ISO route, will that still get tripped up by Cinavia? I have hundreds of blu rays and I'd be surprised if some of them didn't have Cinavia.

Alternatively, could I stream those Cinavia titles to my Roku Mezzmo app? Streaming to my blu ray players is convenient, but I have a Roku in my home theater right next to the blu ray player. The only reason I haven't made it the primary device for the Mezzmo library is that I don't know how to push content to the Roku from an Android tablet, as opposed to opening the Roku and requesting the content.

Yes, you will still get tripped up by Cinavia. As mentioned, your Blu-Ray player is required to support it. There was a time I looked at the Blu-Ray player option for streaming but moved away from it for this reason and others (i.e. codec support, inability to bitstream passthrough some audio formats etc...). To get away from Cinavia you need to move to something which doesn't enforce it such as your Roku option. There are a number of good streamer options for this. Here's a thread on the topic:

Streamer option thread

I am not a fan of the Blu-Ray ISO option. It has advantages but as pointed out, it isn't as clean as ripping out the video track. I use RedFox and it handles playlist obfuscation and rip the Blu-Ray to an ISO and if there is a playlist obfuscation going on it will indicate the proper playlist in the disc.inf file inside the ISO. For ripping the videos I leverage DVDfab. It is clean and quick and will read the playlist obfuscation information out of the RedFox disc.inf file.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Narnian

What is the best "workflow" and ripping software to get where I want to go?

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1) MakeMKV to rip the disc.
2) Optional - re-encode any DTS tracks to AC3 (preserving originals) if your devices don;t play DTS natively and you don't want to re-encode.
3) Re-encode video with handbrake. I have adopted HEVC personally.
4) Any subtitle processing you need to perform so they are supported by endpoints. Recombine in MKV merge.
5) Archive.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by icorrie

1) MakeMKV to rip the disc.
2) Optional - re-encode any DTS tracks to AC3 (preserving originals) if your devices don;t play DTS natively and you don't want to re-encode.
3) Re-encode video with handbrake. I have adopted HEVC personally.
4) Any subtitle processing you need to perform so they are supported by endpoints. Recombine in MKV merge.
5) Archive.

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For the time being, I've decided to hold off on working over the blu rays.

I'm embarrassed to admit that I still have about 200 ancient VHS movies. I threw away about 400 VHS movies last summer, but hung on to about 200 that are either hard to find on DVD or too expensive to upgrade, but that me and the kids might still enjoy. For example, is it really worth $12 to get Gamera VS Zigra or the 1975 Zorro on DVD? The VHS collection was taking up valuable shelf space that could be used for my Blu Rays, so I bought a capture device and I'm converting them to MP4 and tossing them out.

While capturing VHS, I've found that I can rip about 25 DVD titles a week. At that current rate, it will take about ten months to get through the entire DVD collection of movies and TV shows.

Some blu rays are a snap to rip, others get to be very time consuming. I'm taking everyone's suggestions to heart, but I'm ripping very few blu rays right now.

When I've finished with all the DVD's (almost a year away!) I'll follow the suggestions in this thread for getting the right playlist, or I will buy AnyDVD and every accessory package that comes with it. I'll work on the Children's titles that I couldn't get right the first time, then I'll work on all the other blu rays in my collection.