Uncompressed/Lossless vs. Lossy BluRay rips?

[steagle]

I'm kind of OCD when it comes to my movie collection - organization, naming, quality, etc, as I'm sure many of you here are too. I've been ripping and collecting movies for a few years now and have built up a pretty nice collection, but I never saw the value in going uncompressed/lossless, like with BluRay ISOs or BDMV. Storage space of course is an issue - currently I've got a mini NAS with about 3.12TB of space, so I've mostly focused on medium quality rips, in the 8 to 12GB range. They look and sound great and have kept me satisfied for the most part. But recently I decided to try uncompressed files because it seems like if I'm going through all this effort to rip and collect movies, and especially if they're ones I love, I should have the real deal. My receiver supports DTS-HD and TrueHD, the A-200 now supports bitstreaming of these codecs, and uncompressed video looks pretty awesome on my plasma.

So now I'm asking myself - do I go back and replace all these videos with uncompressed versions? This will require a much larger NAS which I'm not really excited about, after dropping quite a few bucks on my current one. But I can't help thinking that if I'm going to be taking this movie collection with me through the rest of my life, and upgrading to better equipment down the road, why not have the best files possible? How do you guys handle this dilemma and I guess the main question is, do you think the gains in audio and video quality are worth the effort involved?

[tesla]

The way I do it is save only the best of the best in BD ISO. I have maybe a hundred or so of those. The rest are compressed/have movie only. I have hundreds of those. I rarely go back and watch the later group but for occasional usage I find them acceptable.

Having the best possible picture and sound from the best of the best library is a must.

[steagle]

yeah, that's a solid approach. i'm feeling the same way. if it's a movie i love and want to watch repeatedly over the years, why settle for something less.

[Bytec]

I hate the slowness of Blu-ray loading and all those FBI warnings and stuff.
That is why I remux all my movies to MKV and keep only those parts that I use. I end up with ~20GB/movie files.

[Dave_D]

To address all the FBI warnings and slow BD Menus, I set my BD/DVD/CD Navigation to "Prompt".

When I run a BDMV/BD ISO I have the option of starting the movie in SimpleBD if I just want to jump in to the main feature or Full Navigation to use the BD Menu.

As great as MKV is, for some titles it's not suitable for every BD title I want to back-up.

- PGS subs still don't work well in single file playback. I have to get external SRT versions.
- It's a lot of work for titles using TrueHD as I have to extract the AC3 core and mux it in a separate audio track alongside the TrueHD track
- Some titles with forced subtitles require more effort to identify/extract/mux into MKV

[steagle]

yeah i had a hell of a time with forced subtitles in the recent Star Wars Saga bluray set. I think I re-ripped the first movie like 3 times before finding a resource online that lists forced subtitles in dozens of movies. not fun! but despite those flaws i prefer mkv as well, i personally don't care about navigation menus or extras 99% of the time, and at least with the A200, it doesn't support full menus anyway on all the blurays i've tried.

[Dave_D]

It's great you like the challenge of making your own MKVs perfect. Not a lot have the patience (like me). So for my own Star Wars set, I just left it 1:1 as is.

The current A200/A210 firmware already supports full BD menus so my AnyDVD HD rips work the same

[steagle]

Hmmm that's weird, my 200 is on the latest firmware and I was having all sorts of problems with BDMV playback. Super slow framerates, to the extent I couldn't even hear audio. Maybe it was a problem with the BDLive menu in Star Wars - can the 200 series handle that?

[Dave_D]

Yes... I've played the rips across the network to/from C200/A200. They all play a-ok on my setup (in signature).

[steagle]

Interesting. I'll have to try it again. I was under the assumption that Syabas wanted you to upgrade to the C200 to get the BD licensing but that's really cool to hear they gave it to the A200 users as well. Any special settings that need to be changed on the PCH or should it just work when playing back BDMV folders?

[Dave_D]

On the A200 (assuming it's already using the latest firmware), just go to setup > BD/DVD/CD Audio and set it to Full Navigation.

As long as the BDMV/BD ISO has had it's encryption removed using commercial ripping applications (like AnyDVD HD), it will play.

[steagle]

You know what, I just realized that BDMV or ISO will not display in my YAMJ + Aeon movie detail view... it will just immediately go to the movie's menu. I think I prefer the Aeon display believe it or not. I like having technical specs and a short description there so if I have friends over they can decide what they want to watch by seeing that stuff, especially helpful if it's something they haven't seen or heard of before. Think I'm going to stick with MKV after all. I've been using MakeMKV to transcode my BluRay rips and it's lossless and easy to use so I'm pretty happy with that.