Ripping and re-encoding video in the age of 4K
DO MORE WITH YOUR DIGITAL MEDIA COLLECTION WITH OUR COMPLETE GUIDE TO RIPPING DISCS AND ENCODING VIDEO.
YOU’VE PROBABLY NOTICED the shuttering of video rental stores around your neighbourhood over the few years, and that’s because the days of DVD and Blu-ray discs are coming to end. Most PC cases these days have also done away with the ugly front port required for an optical drive. This is because video streaming services like Netflix are now delivering movies straight to your home without the inconvenience of travel, and the inevitable pile of late fees that came with renting. There’s also the fact that you can now fit several thousand DVD or Blu-ray discs, once ripped, onto a small personal server the size of a shoebox. Finally, we’ve all suffered the pain when an especially beloved disc gets a nice big scratch across it, rendering the film unwatchable.
Ultra HD Premium Blu-ray players might bring back a resurgence of disc-based film, but until it arrives with a decent catalogue of content, everybody is going digital. So what are you going to do with the huge collection of films you’ve built up over the last few years, yet no longer have room for? The answer is to rip them into a digital format.
Not only does converting your optical disc collection into a digital format take up less physical space, it also makes using them much more flexible. By mounting them on a central server in your home, you can stream your films to any device in your house that is connected to the network. You can even stream them remotely to an internetconnected device outside of your home if your server supports this feature. Converting films into a digital format also means you can change their file size and type via a process called encoding. This means you can ensure they’re the right size for tablet, phone or laptop, so you’ve got a constant supply of entertainment on tap whenever you’re travelling, without having to eat precious bandwidth, while also ensuring each film use the smallest amount of precious disk space.
Before we show you how to rip your discs, we should point out the legalities of doing so. While both DVDs and Blu-rays come with copy protection, ripping them for personal use falls within the realms of ‘fair use’. You’ve paid for the film, so it’s your right to convert it into a format that is most convenient for you. However, this absolutely does not mean that you can then upload the video to a Torrent site or share with friends, as that falls outside of the realms of ‘fair use’. Doing so is breaking the law, so ripper be warned. Also, please note that as 4K Ultra HD Premium videos have new copy protection, and UHD Premium drives for the PC don’t exist yet, ripping these discs is out of the scope of this article.
STEP 1 – RIP THAT DISC
The very first thing we need to do is convert
UPLOADING THE VIDEO TO A TORRENT SITE FALLS OUTSIDE THE REALMS OF ‘FAIR USE’.
your disc into a video file. Obviously your PC will need to be equipped with a DVD or Blu-ray optical disc drive to do so. The software we are going to use to do so is WinISO, which can be downloaded from
www.winiso.com. Grab the WinISO Standard 6 download and install onto your PC.
We’ve selected this program as it gets around most of the commonly used copy protection schemes. Fire up the program and you’ll see this basic interface (see Image 1 screenshot opposite, top right).
Now insert your disc into your optical drive, and select the ‘Make’ button on the top toolbar of the main interface of WinISO. You’ll be prompted to select your source drive, which is your optical drive, as seen in the second screenshot opposite (Image 2).
We’re going to rip the disc as an ISO file, so on this screen, select the output format as ‘ISO Files (*.iso)’. If you’re ripping a Blu-ray disc, you’ll need up to 50GB of spare disk space for the outputted file, so head to the ‘...’ box at the end of the File Name field, and create a new folder on a disk that has at least 50GB of spare space. Type in the name of the film, and hit OK. You’ll now be returned back to the main Make Image screen. Hit the OK button and watch the progress bar to see your rip take place. We ripped a DVD in the interests of time, The Chopper Special Edition, which
measured in at just 5.88GB. However, it took 14 minutes to do the rip — Blu-ray discs can take up to an hour or more. This time will vary based on your hardware, especially the speed of your optical drive and CPU.
Congratulations, you’ve now ripped a 100% perfect copy of your film to your hard drive in a digital format. However, it’s going to be the same size as the source, which isn’t the most efficient way of storing the film. You may also want to change the size of the file for playback on different devices. For example, if you’re playing it back on your 60-inch TV, you’ll want to preserve the native resolution with the best quality possible. However, if you want to load up your iPad, you won’t need the image quality to be as good, and you’ll also want to make the file size as small as possible, so you can fit more films onto the iPad’s relatively small storage space. For this, we’re going to transcode the ripped file. This simply refers to the process of changing a video from one format to another. For this we’re going to use a different piece of software called Handbrake.
TRANSCODING
The first thing you’ll need to do is download your free copy of Handbrake. We suggest downloading from the nightly builds section to get the latest beta, as this supports hardware transcoding on the latest Intel 7th-generation processors, if you’re lucky enough to have one, as well as the latest H265 file format. You can grab it from handbrake.fr.
Install the software and fire it up — you’ll be presented with start up screen (Image 5 back over the page).
As our ISO isn’t a single file, we want to select the Folder (Batch Scan) option. Hit this button and select the folder where you ripped the initial ISO to. Handbrake will then scan for all of the files in that folder.
From here, there are two ways to go about your transcode. Handbrake has helpfully created a set of existing file templates for
various file types, as listed on the right-hand side of the interface, in a window called ‘Presets’. You can select the best option for various resolutions and devices. We’re initially going to convert it for use on an iPad. Drag the bar down to reveal the iPad preset, and highlight this (see Image 4 back over the page).
You’ll notice that, when you select the iPad preset, the parameters in the main window will change to the settings that Handbrake thinks is best for this kind of device. Now we need to choose a destination folder for the transcoded video, so click on the ‘Browse’ bar in the Destination setting, and choose a new folder where the new video will be placed. Type in the new file name for your video. Select a destination folder for your transcoded video, and enter a new file name into the ‘File Name’ field. We went with ‘iPod Chopper’ to make things easy.
Click save to select this destination and file name. Now hit the big Start button at the top of the main interface, and Handbrake will go about its job. Note that the time taken will vary greatly depending on the hardware in your system — see our boxout about hardware acceleration (opposite) to see how various components can speed up the transcoding process, which is a feature that both CPU and GPU manufacturers promote heavily. On our i5-6600K system with GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card, it took 18 minutes to convert the entire film into the new format for iPad.
And that’s that... but as you can see from the Handbrake interface, there’s a myriad of other options to explore. Let’s look at each tab, the first being Picture (Image 7 opposite). This handles the outputted resolution, anamorphic mode, and whether the image is cropped.
The next tab along is Filters (Image 8). This applies various filters that can remove blockiness in the image, clean up any noise from compression (but this will introduce blurriness), control whether the outputted video is interlaced, and rotate or flip the image.
Arguably the most important tab when it comes to quality and speed of the transcode is the Video tab (Image 9). It’s from here that you can choose the Video codec (featuring the option for Intel Quick Sync video), along with a range of settings that control the overall quality. Bear in mind that higher quality equals larger file size.
The Audio Tab (Image 10) is rather self explanatory — just select the range of options that best suits your playback device. Bear in mind, though, that you can’t convert a stereo source to surround, you can only downgrade the existing audio source.
The final two tabs are for subtitles and chapters. Leave the former as is, or import an SRT (subtitle) file to introduce new subtitles if you so desire (but you’ll need to find the SRT to do so, and it has to be a perfect match for your version of the film. The chapters tab can be used to ensure that all chapters are included, for quick skipping from the menu.
As you can see, there are a lot of options to play around with in Handbrake, and we haven’t even touched on the advanced options. Our advice is to play with the tool to find the best settings that balance image quality with size.