Ripping the BluRay or DVD to MKV using MakeMKV

Download and install MakeMKV.

Open MakeMKV and insert the DVD or BluRay you wish to backup.

Select the drive you put the disc in to and press the button of the DVD pointing to the hard drive.

MakeMKV will then scan the disc for all the different videos on the disc. Untick any additional video or audio streams that you don’t want and select a destination folder.

MakeMKV will then start creating your MKV file.

The time the backup takes depends on the size of the data on the disc, the speed of your drive and the speed of your hard drive.

Once MakeMKV has finished you will have an MKV file that you can play on your computer.

Due to copyright restrictions on most DVD’s and BluRay’s you may not be able to rip the video off. To circumvent this, you can purchase AnyDVD.

Shrinking the MKV using HandBrake

Download and install HandBrake.

Note: The latest release as of writing (0.9.4) is unstable on Windows 7 x64 when encoding large BluRay rips. To get around this you can download the latest development snapshot of HandBrake.

Select Source at the top left of the window and select Video file.

HandBrake will the process the file, getting information about the different streams contained within the MKV file.

Double click “regular” on the right hand side to load up the profile.

Change the container to MKV.

Picture

For BluRay, set Anamorphic to Strict. For DVD, set Anamorphic to none and make sure the Keep Aspect Ratio option is ticked. Under cropping, make sure Automatic is selected. This will remove the black bars at the top and bottom of the video to reduce the filesize further.

Video

Change the Video codec to H.264 (x264).

For the quality settings you have 3 options.

Target size*

Set the size of the output you want in MB. Take in to account that the smaller this is the lower the bitrate will end up giving you poorer video quality than you would get with a larger filesize.

For a DVD, setting this between 1,400-2,500MB should give you good enough quality for a backup.

For BluRay, setting this between 8,000-15,000MB should give you a good backup with no visible loss in quality.

Average bitrate*

The default bitrate for DVD’s is around 4,500kbps. The more action in the DVD the higher you will want this. Anything from 700 to 2,000kbps should be fine for most films.

For BluRay, setting this to anything greater than 8,000kpbs should give you no visible loss although if you want slightly better quality, it may be worth upping this to 12,000kbps.

Constant quality

This will use a constant bitrate throughout the film dependant of what is going on in the video. Setting this to anything below 18 is more beneficial. The smaller the number the higher the quality.

* Average bitrate and target size allow you to select 2-pass encoding. This will produce better results but will take longer.

Audio

Select the first audio stream. Then above it select the audio format you want.

For BluRay, it is best to select either DTS Passthru or AC3 Passthru for optimum sound especially if playing through a receiver with SPDIF.

For DVD, you can either chose AC3 Passthru to keep the original audio stream pretty much intact or MP3 (lame).

Start the encode

When you have the options set how you want, click the Start button at the top. The CLI (command line interface) will popup showing you the progress of the encoding.

The installation started properly with no issues from within Windows Vista, then the PC required a restart, so restarted and the installation continued.

A message then came up during installation that “a required driver could not be found”.  This could be a problem, once the error had been closed, the window on screen said that all changes made would be reverted to how they were.  So my thoughts here were that it would restart back to Windows Vista like it was before with a heap of temporary installation files on the C drive.

On restarting, Windows failed to boot.  The error message was a simple “BOOTMGR cannot be found” (something like that can’t remember it off by heart).

So I took the 7 DVD out and put the Vista DVD in to do a repair, although I am sure the 7 DVD would of been able to do it.

Upon booting up using the Vista DVD I selected the repair option at which stage it prompted me that there was a problem with the installation.  Well I knew that, so I decided to try it and pressed the Repair and restart button and let it load up from the hard drive. After the restart the same message appeared.

So I booted back to the Vista DVD and selected repair again.  This time I wasn’t asked if I wanted to repair automatically.  I then chose the repair start up errors option (the one at the top).  After this had completed (took around 10 seconds), I restarted and left it to it’s own devices.  This time the computer went past the error message and I was greeted with Windows 7.  It had installed properly despite the error, although in all likeliness that is what caused the BOOTMGR problem.

Windows 7 finished configuring itself and eventually asked me for a username and password.  I thought this was a bit strange as it should of pulled out my previous accounts, but carried on with the instructions anyway.

Long story short, Windows 7 installed, but without any of the applications installed or documents.

But the application files and documents were present but had been moved in to other folders.  I can only assume that the files would of been moved back in to the main folders rather than the newly created folders if the installation had completed successfully.

Graphics drivers were already installed as was the network drivers. The only drivers that weren’t installed were the X-Fi drivers from Creative.  So I went to their website and downloaded their latest drivers for Vista.

On attempting installation I was greeted with a message saying that the OS was incompatible with the drivers and that I would need to upgrade my OS. Obviously a bad search within the drivers installer, so I set the installer to run in compatibility mode for Windows Vista. This time the installation proceeded without a problem.

I deleted the old application files which weren’t needed any more and was able to back up all the documents back to the rightful place.

After some searching after my previous post.

I have found the answer on the AfterDawn forums.

The only difference being that IsoMagic failed to open up the ISO at all.  Instead I used IsoBuster created by Smart Projects.

The software you will need is:

• IsoBuster – (You will need to purchase, as free trial does not allow ability to extract.)
• tsMuxeR - Freeware.
• mkvtoolnix – Freeware (Windows download at the bottom.)

Here are the steps:

1. Open the ISO in IsoBuster.  Navigate to the BDMV folder then the STREAM folder.
2. In this folder you should find a the video called 00000.mts or 00001.mts or something similar.
3. Extract this to somewhere on your harddrive.
4. Once the file has finally finished extracting to the hard drive, open up tsMuxeR.
5. Add the file you just extracted, you should have a window like the following:
   
6. Press Start demuxing. This will take a few minutes depending on the size of the file and your computer.
7. The outcome of this is that we will have seperate audio and video files which we will now merge together using a great tool called mkvmerge.
8. In mkvmerge, we want to select the .ac3 file and the .264 file, so go to Add at the top right and select both these files.
9. mkvmerge will correctly detect what sort of file they are, but you will need to manually set the fps of the video as mkvmerge won’t be able to detect it.  The output from tsMuxeR will tell you the fps, then all you need to do now is select where you want to save the finished MKV and press Start Muxing.
   
10. Like the demux this will take a while depending on the files and the hardware in your PC, once complete you can play the MKV in your media player.

Job done.  Let me know in the comments if this worked for you.

Edit: See comments if you are getting an out of sync problem.

To convert your file use the following command.

ffmpeg -i “C:\videos\videoname.mov” -ar 44100 -ab 96 -f flv “C:\videos\videoname.flv”

• ffmpeg – runs the program
• -i “filename.ext” – input file
• -ar 44100 – audio frequency
• -ab 96 – audio bitrate
• -f flv – force format followed by format
• “newfilename.ext” – output file

I used these settings to convert some 500MB+ Apple Quicktime (MOV) files down to ~20MB FLV which were perfect for uploading to YouTube.

The image “http://www.example.com/button_bg.png” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

I didn’t know what had caused this as I hadn’t installed any extensions knowingly. This happens for all image files, not just jpg.

The problem was Skype. Go to Tools > Add-ons and uninstall it.

Problem solved. Would be nice for Skype to have said it was installing shit in to Firefox…and if it did it would of been good of me to actually read it.

If you do get this error, the first thing to do is to download and install the latest graphics drivers for your graphics card. I am assuming that you have checked the minimum specification of the game and your computer to make sure your PC can handle it.

To find out what graphics card you have, press Start > Run. Type in dxdiag.

Click Yes on the message that appears.

On the Display tab, make note of the name at the top left.

There are 3 likely manufactures that you will be using. Nvidia, ATi (now called AMD) or Intel.

The first 2 are the most likely.

Go to the website of your graphics card manufacture and download the lastest drivers for your series of graphics card and operating system.

Once downloaded. Go to Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs. Remove your old graphics card drivers, and only your graphics card drivers. If you have an Nvidia graphics card and an nForce motherboard, only remove the display drivers.

Once the uninstallation has completed, restart. Once restarted, install the drivers that you just downloaded beforehand.

Once the installation has finished, restart. Set up your screen resolution again if it isn’t detected properly.

Now try to run Unreal Tournament 3. If it still doesn’t work, you can try reinstalling the game. If that doesn’t work, head over to the Epic forums.

Note: There are 2 patches out for Unreal Tournament 3. 1.1 and 1.2. I don’t think you need 1.1 installed to install 1.2.

Download 1.1

Download 1.2 (Latest)

If you do have this problem is is likely that you do not have access to the first Advanced button, which will be greyed out and you will get the error message about the volume control program when you tick the box “Place the volume icon in the taskbar”.

And here is how you get it back:

Option 1 – If you have access to another computer running the same Operating System:

Go to another computer running the same version operating system. If you are using Windows XP SP1, go on to another XP SP1 computer, or if you are using a Windows XP SP2 machine go to to another XP SP2 machine etc.

Go to the C:\Windows\System32 folder (this folder may be different for you, the letter at the beginning should be your drive letter). Find a file called sndvol32.exe. Copy this to a network share, CD or a USB memory stick.

Now on the PC with the problem copy this file over to C:\Windows\System32 folder (this folder may be different for you, the letter at the beginning should be your drive letter) and that should fix the problem.

Option 2 – If you don’t have access to another computer but you have your original Windows CD (note: not a restore CD):

Browse the CD and locate the I386 folder. In here find sndvol32.ex_. Copy this to your C: (I said C: because it is a lot easier to type in to a command prompt than a long directory).

Open a command prompt (Start > Run > type in cmd and press OK.)

Use the command expand followed by SNDVOL32.EX_ SNDVOL32.EXE. In Explorer copy the SNDVOL32.EXE from the C: to C:\Windows\System32. Problem should be fixed.

Alternatively you can copy it over straight away from the CD using the expand command:

d:
cd i386
expand sndvol32.ex_ c:\windows\system32\sndvol32.exe

Where D: is your CD/DVD drive.

Option 3 – If you don’t have another computer or your Windows CD:

You can download the file from RapidShare. Extract the zip and copy the file to your C:\Windows\System32 folder. Problem should be fixed.

I am not sure if this will work for all XP setups. I am sure it should work OK on Home or Professional but I am not sure how interchangeable it is between service packs. But the file hasn’t been modified since 2001, so it should be OK for all service packs, but it hasn’t been tested.

Microsoft know about this problem. You can read more about it in KB319095.

This is tested and working in Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Edit: From the comments, it appears that this only works when opening Nero through Nero Express or Nero Burning Rom. If you go through StartSmart, it may not work. I can’t test this because I don’t use StartSmart, it is bloated crap for the less IT inclined people to use.

1. First of course you will need Nero installed.
2. Open Nero Burning Rom.
3. Cancel the first window, then go to File > Options
4. Select the Audio tab.
5. Make note of the Plug-in directory.
6. Close Nero.
7. Then make your way to bitburners.com and download the plugins you wish. If you are just doing FLAC files then all you need is the FLAC plug-in, not FAAC.
8. Save the zip file to your desktop.
9. Using your zip extration program of your choice, get the DLL file out of the zip.
10. Copy the DLL to your Plug-in directory that you found out in Nero.
11. Now restart Nero Burning Rom.
12. Go to File > Options and press the Audio tab.
13. This time press the Options button.
14. You will see a list of all the plugins installed in Nero.
    
15. Now when you try and burn a file using Nero you will be able to add FLAC files to your CD.