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The Blu-Ray Reauthoring Project
- AdmiralAsshat 8y agoI wonder, with some amusement, how much the current state of multimedia ripping, editing, encoding, MUXing, etc. owes to the underground community of internet nerds that just wanted to watch their anime.
- mrec 8y agoI'm a little puzzled as to why he's so set on having a physical disc as output. If this is for personal use, wouldn't it be easier to just rip the episodes to mp4 using Handbrake, which can also add subtitles? And once you've got eps as separate files, no need for menus. I buy a fair few Blu-Rays, but I've never watched one directly. It's just a distribution format for me.
- esotericn 8y agoYeah. I take the UNIX approach to media storage, everything is a file. If it's not a file, that's probably due to some anti-user nonsense (a dvd, bluray, whatever could just be an FS with an mp4/mkv/whatever file on it, but it's not, 'cos DRM.). A challenge, then.
- JoshTriplett 8y agoGiven the mention of menus, I could readily imagine someone who uses a Blu-Ray player as their viewing device of choice, and prefers the approach of keeping a library of discs.
- Adamantcheese 8y agoHey there, author here. I mainly wanted to have physical discs so I could have them stored in the collector's edition boxes that can with the original Japanese discs. If I just wanted the video out, then I would've been done in a week!
- conwaytwitty 8y agoI personally own a lot of dvd's and blurays, but it's been a while since I actually watch them in that format. I just rip the disc to my harddrive, demux/convert what i want (usually just the main audio to flac), then remux to mkv and store the result (video + audio + eng subs + commentary tracks). Then just watch in kodi/plex. Dealing with the actual discs etc seems just weird, neither dvd nor bluray as a media was never any fun to use. Using a remuxed copy of a tv series i'd be half way through an episode by the time the trailers and fbi warnings stopped playing on the disc version.
- sigi45 8y agoI had probably 400 DVDs and i never started with BluRay. Not because of the cost, i can afford what i like to watch, but having to buy the physical copy, which i would rip and put on my storage system and than would probably need to store or throw away, sucks. Why can't i just buy a digital BluRay? Like yes i can do whatever i want with it :| Yes i know people would copy those asap but still AARGH...
- compsciphd 8y agoIf you're really rich, you can. Kalaidescope. But the studios really fought them hard on that.
- sigi45 8y ago"I liked it so much I had it installed in all of my homes." -_-
- jumelles 8y agoThere's also a whole section about their experience installing systems on yachts!
- dasyatidprime 8y ago“Kaleidescape” seems to be the exact name, for anyone who got confused like I did here.
- gambiting 8y ago"Blu-Rays are very hard to edit and it's no wonder that they're dying in comparison to streaming" I see zero corellation here. Out of people buying blu-rays maybe 0.00001% will want to rip them and edit them.
- lozenge 8y agoBut they might want to watch a video of their kids' school play or some other video not from a big studio.
- paulie_a 8y agoDo people actually ever watch those videos though? People love to record events and then it collects dust afterwards.
- jpfed 8y agoMy family definitely rewatches videos all the time. As they grow, my kids become new people every year or so; I like the chance to at least briefly visit every one of the people they have been.
- thebooktocome 8y agoThe publisher needs to be able to edit the disc the first time. If that part is expensive in time and money, small publishers aren't going to pick up the format.
- SCAQTony 8y agoOff-topic: Accessibility-wise reversed out type is difficult to read, if one must have a black background a green colored font is best.
- wccrawford 8y agoI'm rather disappointed that he pirated some software for this. I thought this would be a how-to to help people in the future. >You can find a copy of the BDFix Pro installer and a keygen here.
- mparramon 8y agoHe said that the cart page of the software website was blank, the last version of the software was from 2012 and the web page was last updated in 2014, so he had no other option.
- mnw21cam 8y agoLegally dubious, morally ... make your own mind up?
- superflyguy 8y agoLegally dubious? Not sure of the "website is old so pop along to a .ru site" exemption to copyright law. Did the author attempt to contact the copyright owners or discover an alternative?
- mnw21cam 8y agoThat's why it's legally dubious.
- superflyguy 8y agoProbably you are using a non-standard definition of the word dubious.
- syntheticnature 8y agoNot the original poster, but Merriam Webster gives a sense 2b to dubious: questionable or suspect as to true nature or quality the practice is of dubious legality
- hlandau 8y agoThe Blu-Ray video format is pretty cancerous in terms of DRM; there's not really any salvaging it. One of the most nauseating restrictions of all is that replication plants aren't even allowed to fabricate Blu-Ray video discs which don't have AACS. This means that if you want to get some Blu-Ray video disc fabricated which contains Creative Commons content and you disagree with DRM, for example, you're out of luck: AACS is mandatory. Archive Team had issues with this - as I recall, the best compromise they were able to find was to just put video files on a normal Blu-Ray data disc and get that fabbed. I suspect this is enforced using conditions in the patent licences Sony hands out to fabs or DRM in the software used by fabrication plants, or both. You start to realise why this is the case when you research how the production process works. When you send a Blu-Ray video disc to a fab for mass production, you don't apply the encryption; the fab does, and you have no control over the process. Moreover, this process involves sending a request for encryption keys to AACS LA, who then issue newly-minted encryption keys for the disc. Yes, this means that all Blu-Ray video discs must be centrally approved by a single organisation in realtime, as an integral part of the AACS application process. Which explains why AACS is mandatory; it lets them catch attempts by commercial pirates to get discs replicated in mass. So I don't think Blu-Ray can ever become a non-helldamned format. The fact that the specifications are all secret is just the icing on the cake (this is actually the case for DVD too, open source implementations all had to reverse engineer it). I always found it deeply ironic that by comparison, the AACS specification, which specifies a DRM scheme, a type of thing fundamentally dependent on security by obscurity, is freely available.
- pathartl 8y agoI find this deeply amusing. I see how this could have worked in the DVD era, but these days with all of the options we have it's no surprise why most people don't have bluray players. It is kinda sad though because as much as streaming gives us options, the quality is always terrible.
- superflyguy 8y agoYouTube and Netflix stream for me just fine. Are you on 4g/fibre?
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoI haven't done much Blu-ray ripping, but I try to keep an eye on it to make sure it's still "working" as a thing. I want a movie collection, but I don't want to invest heavily in maintaining a RAID array of live drives to store giant 25 GB archives of each movie. I'd much rather just hang onto the Blu-ray discs, and know that inevitably they all get cracked, so I'll always have ripping options if I need it. As a physical disc you can keep in your possession, it's still really the only way to "own" a movie these days. Vudu is nice, and I'll do a lot of casual watching via my digital copy codes, but the discs are my "collection".
- mrec 8y agoBlu-Ray rips from Handbrake etc aren't the raw on-disc encoding, and aren't actually that big. ~2-3GB is typical with decent quality. Often the filesize is surprisingly close to that from a DVD, presumably because the DVD one is encoding a bunch of unwanted compression artifacts.
- sigi45 8y agoBecause a DVD is using mpeg2 and Handbreak uses x.264
- mrec 8y agoNo, I'm comparing re-encoded rips to mp4 from both DVD and BD, both via Handbrake, both using H.264.
- sigi45 8y agoOkay; But in that case i'm not really sure how you rip your DVDs. H.264 for DVD and that low resolution doesn't need 2-3 Gig at all. Sure audio is always an issue, can't do much there.
- mrec 8y agoI'm not saying the BD rips aren't bigger, just that they're nowhere near as much bigger as the resolution and quality improvements might suggest. So BD averages maybe 2.5 GB, and DVD averages maybe 1.5 GB, while a BD frame has nearly 7 times as many pixels. I do set CQ a couple of stops higher for DVD, as per Handbrake recommendations, just because DVD has to get enlarged so much when watching fullscreen.
- pjc50 8y agoI'm secretly pleased that I never really took up the format and am still buying DVDs if I want a hardcopy of something.
- mixmastamyk 8y ago> We'll be using easySUP to convert our ASS file to a SUP file. Was the spec written by precocious twelve-year olds?
- Adamantcheese 8y agoASS stands for Advanced Sub-Station (Alpha). It's a newer version of the Sub-Station Alpha format. Acronyms aren't always made to be funny, sometimes they just turn out that way.
- ohithereyou 8y agoFor comparison between BluRay and DVD: I did something similar, also for an animated series, for DVD. I took DVDs from Japan, ripped the video, and inserted good subtitles (the original subtitles for the series as released in the US were trash), and burned to DVD. The hardest part was making sure the subtitles were in sync. After that, a simple shell script and dvdauthor were all I needed. With some modifications, this shell script could also take speedsubbed episodes and produce DVDs containing between four and six episodes per disc (this was before streaming simultaneous releases). To address a question from mrec above about why physical media was chosen - I was making this set of discs for a friend for a lending library for their club. The easiest way to move video around at the time was DVD (this was right as BluRay was taking off). Having the disc images was also helpful in case the (relatively fragile) DVD-R media got damaged while it was lent out.
- babypuncher 8y agoWhat a strange end-goal. I'm not sure why you would want to "reauthor" a DVD or a Blu-Ray, as their contents are much more convenient once you've ripped and transcoded them. The difficulty he encountered doesn't sound like a good reason at all to buy DVDs instead. I have roughly 200 Blu-Rays in my collection, and I've watched maybe one or two of them in an actual Blu-Ray player.
- slartibardfast0 8y agoBack when I cared about physical media I wrote a substation alpha to blu-ray subtitle encoder. It isn't exactly spec compliant. Hilariously, the spec is patented dispite prior art & simple run length encoding: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20090185789/da https://patents.google.com/patent/US20090185789/da). Output is good enough for power dvd when using the admittedly closed source TSMuxer. Always meant to try to port it to ffmpeg, but it just doesn't seem worthwhile, given the context of Netflix. https://github.com/slartibardfast/punkgraphicstream https://github.com/slartibardfast/punkgraphicstream
- Adamantcheese 8y agoI actually tested out PunkGraphicsStream as a subtitle renderer, but it had issues with some fade effects which is why I had to go with easySup instead.
- m-p-3 8y agoI'm kinda glad the piracy community exists because of all the tools and file format they bring to the masses that are useful for legitimate archival purpose, which are well thought and make sense. MKV containers with multiple audio tracks and embedded subtitles in actual text format makes so much sense that you wonder who the hell thought the Blu-Ray specs made sense. It tells a lot when mainstream device manufacturers starts sorting these formats that came from the scene.
- zzo38computer 8y agoBlu-Ray is complicated and stupid. A better way is, simply patent-free unencrypted video files with track numbers and caption streams, perhaps on a HD-DVD disc (without using the HD-DVD video format). We don't need menus and AACS and all of that other junk, please.
- elheffe80 8y agoMy son, 11, just asked me "What's a blu-ray?" Need I say more?
- johnchristopher 8y agoSo basically you'd be better off ripping and then adding subtitles and video files as data on your media of choice (BDRay, HDD, networked HDD, etc.).