MakeMKV, Handbrake equivalent

Good Day all

Just wondering if anyone has any suggestions on software better the MakeMKV and handbrake combination for ripping Blurays and DVD's, thinking about purchasing MakeMKV but before I do wanted to see if there was something I was over looking.

The system i'm using for the conversion is a i9-7900x with a 780ti GPU, the GPU is of course pretty much idle during the conversion process so i'm wondering if there are any solutions that leverage the GPU as well as the CPU.

Currently I'm moving my entire film / box-set collection to Plex as we are moving house and the discs will be in storage boxes until the loft of the new place has been converted into a home cinema and games room. Quite possibly this will take a year or two.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

Mike

 

As someone who is in the middle of this process I have not found a better option.
MakeMKV is still beta, thus it can be used without purchase, one just need to periodically get the update key from the developer's forum.

I don't know about leveraging the GPU, I think I have read that the GPU architecture isn't ideal for transcoding. You can l increase your through put by launching a instance of MakeMKV per optical drive. Just make sure each instance is only trying to read from an idle drive otherwise it really bogs down the drive access. I have test ruining multiple instance of handbreak, with my A10 this appears to be a close trade off, can transcode one file in approximately half the time as I can transcode two in parallel. For me I found it easiest to que up one instance. With you CPU you might have different experience.

 

MakeMKV and Handbrake is the best combination I've found.

With your CPU it's going to the reading of the disks that takes the time, but If you're not doing it already, ripping a batch to MKV then queuing and encoding them all at once unattended (i.e. overnight) in Handbrake can save time.

While I was digitizing my collection it occurred to me that in fact multiple optical drives and multiple instances of MakeMKV would probably be the biggest timesaver. It's something I'd look into if I was transferring a big collection.

 

Thanks for the replies, I'll stick to what I'm doing then by the looks of it which is indeed ripping 2 discs at once to MKV then using handbrake when I have a batch ready. Only real benefit of this processor so far is I can game with handbrake running and not have any real performance issues. I was really looking for a slightly more stream lined process for the handbrake section but I'm guessing that's not really an option.

If I had had my sensible hat on when I built this machine I'd never have gone with the i9 but I'm happy with it if i'm honest and I'm hoping the rig lasts at least as long as my i7-2600k it's replaced. Now just have to wait until the successor to the 1080ti is released at a sensible price.....

 

As wolfticket and I have suggested the best approach is to batch run Handbrake. Once you have determined your preferred rip settings, video/audio/subtitles/chapters save as the default profile. Then use open folder, and under Add To Queue select Add ALL. I use this for TV series and I don't bother with adding the chapter titles into TV. Movies I add individually as I import the chapters from Chapter DB, the downloaded csv files requires a little additional parsing, which I do with a macro in notepad++, before importing into Handbrake.

 

Not sure what all that software you are using is doing but if it is just making digital copies of bluray/DVD I use Pavtube video converter, I just pop a disc in push a button and out comes my avi for my daughters tablet, seems to work fine for me, one bit of software, can use GPU too.

Not done any for a while since streaming services allowed offline download but it was good.

 

The biggest time saver will be just skipping the handbrake step.
MakeMKV on its own is pretty quick, storage is cheap, and if you're going to box your physical media up you may as well have an unmolested copy of it to watch.

 

I'm sure this is a daft question but how do you watch the files resulting from the makeMKV rip?

 

vlc

 

Thanks, never realised you could open the whole disc image straight from VLC. Now i have to decide if i continue copying the discs to plex (300 and 45 boxsets films done) or stop and just use VLC and up the HDD space quite a bit.

 

Plex will transcode .mkv files just fine, just be cautious, if you have a large .mkv file and you want to send it over a network or the internet, you do need some CPU grunt.

Sam