Good point about the compression. Here is what MediaInfo shows: Mpeg 2 - 1h 37m 1 video stream - MPEG Video 1 audio stream - AC-3 First video stream - 9800 kbps, 1920*1086 at 23.976 fps First audio stream - 448 kbps, 48 KHz, 6 channels, AC-3 I honestly couldn't tell a difference between the folder rip and the MPEG2. This may be my ultimate solution for the smallish Blu-ray collection I have. It's all animated stuff for my two sons - which tends to look good in any format anyway. I still plan on giving your process a shot in the next day or so.

Dave,

How long did it take to do the mkv->mpeg2 conversion? A single blu-ray using my method takes 10+hours, i'd like to give your method a try as well to see if I can tell the difference in video quality. -A

DVRMSToolbox converted the MKV in about 2 hours. The MakeMKV process took about 45 minutes. I just did another one today, Chicken Little, and the results were the same. I'm liking this process more and more each time I use it. My whole library is MPEG2 anyway, so this is similar to what I do with DVD rips.

 

 

I just wanted to share my experiences on this old post as I feel that there isn't a lot of good information out there on this subject.

Here are the scenarios I ran:
1. Full Quality Rips: Removed encryption with AnyDVD HD -> Moved Full Quality Stream and 5.1 to MKV with MakeMKV; Result: This would stream to my XBOX and would play until it stutters on the bitrate.
2. 15Mbps Handbrake Re-encode: Remove Protection & Rip to HDD with AnyDVD HD -> Re-encode using Handbrake High Profile, MKV, with Avg Bitrate at 14500 (have it convert DTS to AAC if the audio isn't DD where you should use AC3 Passthrough); Result: The videos play very well on the XBOX. The quality difference between the re-encode and the Blu-Ray can be noticed but it is hard to tell. The rip is much better than any downloaded rip. File sizes are around 6.5 GB / Hr.

Other Comments:
- FF/RWD could be better in the MKV containter. I may try a swap to WTV container with DVRMStoolbox to improve this but for now I am fine.
- You lose 5.1 on DTS audio when you convert for Xbox.
- Ripping without encoding takes ~1.5 hours; Ripping and Re-encoding with 2 pass takes 10 hours.

Questions: Would 720P with average bit rate of 14500 may be better for fast action movies as you are trading resolution for a better frame rate? With the 15 mbps average bit rate constraint and 1080p content you can occasionally notice that the frame rate is less than a blu-ray.

Thanks for the summary - that is good info. So it looks like there is not a 4GB limit on h.264 mkv's like there is on .mp4's - that's great news. I had bad luck with Handbrake encodes (DVD to h.264 mkv) and skipping ahead and back (the audio seemed to be trailing the video for 5-6 secs). For some reason if I ran the handbrake encode through MKVmerge, skip ahead and skip back work much better...

That is odd that you had that problem. I re-encoded 40 DVD movies this week with Handbrake DVD preset with constant quality at 80% and with AC3 passthrough and they all seem to work great on the Xbox with exception of limited functionality of FF/RW. I think the FF/RW is a mkv container issue that can be solved by remuxing to WTV.

The highest bitrate wtv files I can stream are about 14mbps thru media center 7 to the xbox.

If I go anything above that I get skipping but its not because of the xbox. It also stutters on my main PC in WMC7 also.

cjhighway

I have the new Transformers blu-ray disk.  I just riped it off the disk with AnyDvd and converted the DTS audio to AC3 with eac3to.  Then I muxed it back together with Tsmuxer.  It will play on the xbox360 but the bitrate is way too high and this causes it to skip.  I have done multiple blu-ray titles this way and they played fine except this one.  So what I did was this, I took the movie file I muxed back together with Tsmuxer and converted it to WMVHD with windows media encoder.  I encoded it at 10Mbps with the audio at 440kbps, 24 bit 5.1.  It plays flawless.  Now I can tell you that I've converted blu-ray movies to WMVHD and left the bit rate at 15Mbps with no issues except they don't fast forward or rewind good but they play flawlesly.  I say this to say that the xbox360 can handle bit rates up at 15Mbps if it is in WMVHD format.  I don't know about other formats though.  I usually take all my blu-ray titles, rip them off the disk and convert to WMVHD and call it a day, only takes about four hours on my laptop to do.

 

What kind of processor do you have on your laptop? A Core i7??? I use either TMPGenc or Expression Encoder 3 to convert my Blu-ray rips to WMVHD on my Q6600 Quad and it usually always takes at least a couple days @10 mbps. I have not used Windows Media Encoder for a long time because I could never get it to work well with HD content. So you can use Windows Media Encoder and load a remuxed M2TS file and convert it to WMVHD in FOUR HOURS on a laptop???  

I also want to put in plug for converting to WMVHD. It is the only format that works across all MS platforms (MC, Xbox dashboard, & Zune) and gives you full FF/RW and resume. WTV would be a good option too if you could use it in the dashboard or natively convert WTV w/AC3 to a Zune compatible format within the software itself.