Using MakeMKV and Blu-Ray Movies

[Mango1970]

Hey Folks,
I started to convert my Blu-Ray library to MKV, using the new MakeMKV which preserves the DTS-MA and TrueHD audio formats. I am storing all these movies on my WHS computer and playing them off my Seagate Freeagent Theatre+. So far so good. Now it takes a good amount of time on my Intel Q6600 running at stock (2400Mhz), 4 GB of RAM, 500 GB Seagate HD, Asus P5Q-Pro mobo running on a fresh install of Win7 64 premium.

I have noted and watched as the conversion takes place that my CPU (all 4 cores) are hardly being stressed -- like 20 to 30% max on all 4 cores. However my 4 GB of RAM is being all consumed -- nothing is available it shows... and if I try to open ANYTHING else while doing this process, it takes 30 seconds just to open explorer. On average I am looking at 1 hour per BR movie.

Since I have a CRAP load of BR movies... and about 300 regular DVD's which i am slowly adding to my WHS... what would folks recommend as an upgrade path to speed up this conversion? Am I not understanding the CPU usage properly so is it CPU bound? Or would 8 to 16 GB of RAM be the best investment?

The computer which is doing the work is NOT the WHS... I rip the movie to the working computer and then transfer the 25-30GB MKV file to my WHS which has 8TB of space.

Again is it a CPU issue, a RAM issue or a HD issue? I REALLY love MakeMKV... it's just so easy to use and just WORKS. The second it becomes official and not just Beta I am buying it.

Anyhow any ideas?

Edit: Forgot to mention I am using an LG GGC-HL20 firmware 1.03 BR-HD-DVD drive to rip the movies.. not sure if that is simply the bottleneck.. and it wont get any faster. Thanks

 

[tw1164]

If you only have 1 BR drive that's your first bottleneck. If you want to do the process faster you'll need more then one optical drive. I'm in the process of doing the same thing, and I'm using 2 DVD drives and 1 BR drive. If you're willling to pay money, you should look into using MyMovies (for WHS) w/ AnyDvd. I will rip the disk (to ISO I think), grab your metadata, and spit the disc out. It's all automated.

I'm able to use MakeMkv on 3 discs concurrently while using PC for light task such as web surfing. We have very similar computers (I only have 3GB ram though). I'm copying all my MKV to my secondary HD though.

 

[MrChad]

I have noted and watched as the conversion takes place that my CPU (all 4 cores) are hardly being stressed -- like 20 to 30% max on all 4 cores. However my 4 GB of RAM is being all consumed -- nothing is available it shows... and if I try to open ANYTHING else while doing this process, it takes 30 seconds just to open explorer. On average I am looking at 1 hour per BR movie.

On a quad core CPU, 25% in Task Manager means you're maxing out the core.

 

[The-Noid]

ripbot264 uses 100% cpu on all 4 cores of my 920 @ 3.2 ghz also stresses hyperthreaded cores 100%.

Total time is about 3-5 hours depending on movie length using highest quality profile and converting high def audio to flac.

 

[mc866]

I've also been using ripbot264 for BR conversion. It will max out all 8 threads on my 860 when converting. To try and speed things up a bit I rip the BR to .iso first so I can batch encode multiple movies at once and just let it run overnight.

So in summary try converting from .iso so you aren't relying on BR drive read speeds, and also give ripbot a try, it should be able to fully utilize your proc which should speed things up a bit.

 

[abaez]

It's your optical drive. I've ripped the same movie from the optical drive and from an iso and the iso took only like 10 minutes.

But it takes a good 30-40 minutes to rip a BR to ISO with AnyDVD, so in the end the time is the same.

 

[The-Noid]

With ripbot you do not need to rip to ISO.

It will demux the .ts file onto your hard drive as a .mkv video file and a audio file. Youc an then do the encode at any point into the future.

 

[tw1164]

Does ripbot decrypt BD?

 

[Mango1970]

Wow lots of great help here. I had never even heard of Ripbot. Also in regards to using two drives... man I am slow.... I somehow figured it would bog down my system if I were to access two optical drives at once but I will for sure try that since I have a second BR drive on my other computer.

I am assuming that if I use Ripbot I will need to purchase AnyDVDHD correct?

 

[abaez]

It just won't get any faster reading from the optical drive.