CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

perisoft · Joined: 29 Aug 2007 Posts: 2920 Location: Ithaca, NY

So, I've been doing bluray for a while now. I've used two methods to rip BDs - ClownBD, which spits out .ts files, and MakeMKV, which... spits out .mkv files.

MPCHC has been my normal player, and it works fine... mostly... with .ts. OK, it has to be in EVR or it gets horrible audio desync, and it has to be in EVR Custom Pres. or it pops up blacks to gray. And it has to be... well, you get the idea. Anyway, it mostly works.

Unfortunately, ClownBD's .ts spitter-outer is, true to video file form, unreliable. Sometimes stuff comes through with no audio despite it being specified to do so. Sometimes nothing comes out at all. Sometimes it comes out but has a big blurp of corruption every second or so. Etc etc etc... Without actually going through and checking various points in the movie, you can't tell whether it's worked right. And when you haven't seen the movie yet, that's kind of a downer.

That leaves MKVs. MakeMKV generally works quite well at spitting out MKVs. Unfortunately, MPCHC works quite badly at playing them. In no particular order:

1) Play studio intro animation and crash
2) Play with no audio when audio is in file
3) Play with French audio when both French and English are in file; audio selector is always broken
4) Play, but stutter constantly
5) Play with all available audio streams playing at once

Also, ReClock fails with MKVs - it can't detect a video stream. Why? Who the f*ck knows.

There's SMPlayer. It just crashes on a regular basis no matter what.

There's VLC Player. It has a weird-ass UI which will randomly expand the toolbar so it fills the entire screen. It plays MKVs fairly reliably - and reliably provides horrible tearing, occasional freezes, and stutter. It also forces you to use its own codecs, so ac3filter is a no-go.

This is all absolutely infuriating. My wife just wants to watch a goddamned movie, rather than having to spend a half hour starting to watch and then going back to fix something, or re-rip something, or re-rent it from netflix because it got screwed up the first time.

Various combinations of players and rippers ALL FAIL, and all fail in DIFFERENT WAYS. Delayed audio, choppy video, wrong audio, wrong stream, wrong colors, only plays in stereo, plays multiple streams at once, can't seek within the file, crashes randomly in the middle of playing, and on and on and on and f*cking on. I'm not sure I've seen the same failure twice; it's difficult to comprehend how everyone involved in this business can fail so completely, consistently and with such diversity.

What rippers/players are you guys using, and what are you using to rip blurays? I'm about to blow six kinds of gasket here...

emdawgz1 · Joined: 14 Mar 2006 Posts: 7949

Arcsoft has a media player that handles MKV files... no problems

http://www.arcsoft.com/en-us/software_title.asp?ProductCode=TMT3S

Download the trial. Thumbs Up

Zebu Fellenz · Joined: 21 Dec 2006 Posts: 2567

I rip to MKV with FLAC audio using Mike Eby's excellent GUI, it has worked fine for over 80 discs so far and I've only found one it would work with 100%

I downloaded Shark007 codec pack x64 and now play my MKV files in Windows Media Center (Windows 7 Pro x64) without any problems, MKV files also play pretty well in VLC although I do have some minor tearing.

What do you have for a CPU, RAM, etc? Probably not the problem but it's an easy check.

Zebu Fellenz · Joined: 21 Dec 2006 Posts: 2567

I'll grab MPCHC and see how it works for me, I don't remember having any issues with it before though.

akajester · Joined: 09 Jul 2008 Posts: 934 Location: Wisconsin

I use makemkv to rip then haali media splitter and mpchc to play. ffdshow supports x264 playback too now. I think they use mpchc code in it.

greg_mitch · Joined: 03 May 2006 Posts: 5320

WTH guys...we have one of the greatest MKV tools on the internet and it was developed by one of our very own and you are insisting on using a million of hodgepodged programs without first person technical support?!!?

https://www.curtpalme.com/forum_archived/viewtopic.php@t=17002.html

perisoft · Joined: 29 Aug 2007 Posts: 2920 Location: Ithaca, NY

emdawgz1 · Joined: 14 Mar 2006 Posts: 7949

Power DVD 10 now sys it plays MKV as well as Bluray...

and it offers a free trial.

PowerDVD is the consumer’s favorite Blu-ray / DVD playback software, complemented by high- definition Dolby and DTS audio technologies. PowerDVD now converts 2D movies into 3D, plays an extensive range of video formats including MKV, FLV, 3GP, and makes movies social by sharing bookmark reviews and live comments. Experience PowerDVD - the best Blu-ray playback and DVD player software available today.
Supported formats for Blu-ray & DVD playback

Supports the latest video formats: MKV, FLV, 3GP, AVCHD and AVCREC
Supports the latest audio formats: Dolby TrueHD, Digtial EX, Plus; DTS-HD
Transform 2D into 3D
Compatible with Windows 7

http://www.cyberlink.com/downloads/trials/powerdvd/download_en_US.html?affid=2581_720_504_8935_0_ENU&utm_source=CLHP_HotDownload&utm_medium=CLHP_HotDownload_8935_powerdvd&utm_campaign=CL_Homepage

nuttall_chris · Posted: Wed Mar 31, 2010 3:44 pm Post subject:

I rip BD disks with ClownBD to ISO format, only keeping the main movie and the HD audio. I mount the disk images with Slysoft Virtual CloneDrive and playback with PowerDVD 7.3.

It works perfectly 100% of the time with zero issues.

Chris.

MikeEby · Joined: 24 Jun 2007 Posts: 5237 Location: Osceola, Indiana

With 32 Bit Windows 7 the only software you need install for "Playing" movies ripped as MKV's with FLAC audio is MPC-HC (32-Bit) and the latest DirectX 9 patch.

http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/download-media-player-classic-hc.html

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2da43d38-db71-4c1b-bc6a-9b6652cd92a3&displaylang=en

I use ReClock as my audio render. Since I run 72Hz refresh on my Projector.

http://forum.slysoft.com/showthread.php?t=39338

I also use MediaBrowser to launch MPC-HC from within Windows Media Center 7.

Other than Windows there is not a commercial piece of software on my HTPC.

On my Ripper/Media server box I did have to pop for AnyDVD-HD.

Mike

perisoft · Joined: 29 Aug 2007 Posts: 2920 Location: Ithaca, NY

I'd rather shoot myself in the armpit with a paintball gun than use PowerDVD - if for no other reason than its inability to do software rendering. Without VideoEqualizer, the whole exercise is moot.

Like I said, MPHHC plus MKVs just doesn't work, at least not with the MKVs that MakeMKV makes.

I'm going to try our homegrown MKV ripper and see what the results are with various players - at least then I can narrow issues down to the ripper or the player, hopefully!

MikeEby · Joined: 24 Jun 2007 Posts: 5237 Location: Osceola, Indiana

nuttall_chris · Posted: Wed Mar 31, 2010 5:39 pm Post subject:

perisoft · Joined: 29 Aug 2007 Posts: 2920 Location: Ithaca, NY

Well, this is what I'm talking about.

I've tried the another eac3to gui, and.... No good. If I rip with truehd and core audio, nothing finds any audio at all - plus, MPCHC plays the result misconverged! At least with Star Trek. Why? How? Who knows!

The GUI docs say that when you pick the stream in the 'results' window, it'll show options in the windows below. But it doesn't. It's just blank.

If I deselect TrueHD and *only* have the core AC3 audio selected... the GUI crashes.

I'm running the (legit!) latest copy of AnyDVDHD, all the prerequisites as specified in the anothereac3to thread, the latest mpchc... I uninstalled reclock in case that's causing issues.

I'm not sure what else I can do here. The sh*t just *doesn't work*.

MikeEby · Joined: 24 Jun 2007 Posts: 5237 Location: Osceola, Indiana

Zebu Fellenz · Joined: 21 Dec 2006 Posts: 2567

Elaine Benes · Joined: 25 Apr 2006 Posts: 1416

perisoft · Joined: 29 Aug 2007 Posts: 2920 Location: Ithaca, NY

Wombat · Joined: 18 Aug 2006 Posts: 16

I'm just going to point out that VLC isn't able to exploit all the hardware acceleration features of video cards. I'd been wondering why WinDVD and PowerDVD would play HD-DVD or Blu-ray movies off disc flawlessly, with low CPU usage, but VLC could only produce something resembling a slide show from a ripped BD (or that Mythbusters Nvidia demo in 1080p). Anyway, I eventually found a post that explained that current versions of VLC just won't use the high-def video decoding features. (My HDPC uses an 8500GT)

ArcSoft TotalMedia Theatre doesn't exploit hardware acceleration by default; there's a box to check in the video settings. It's not perfect; horizontal pans show "strips" of picture that are offset; this may be due to lack of double buffering, according to some post somewhere. I'm not sure if that can be fixed by tweaking a setting.

I'd hoped to use the WD TV Live! connected to a DVI monitor, but it turns out the Live! has a bug that it only does 720x480 through DVI. It does look great with an HDMI monitor in 720p, though.

Elaine Benes · Joined: 25 Apr 2006 Posts: 1416

I use a PS3 for playback and PS3MediaServer on all the machines that have any mkv's. It works pretty good, I haven't encountered one yet that it won't play back. It seems funny there isn't any "guaranteed to work" software solution for HD mkv's...