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Distancing task #1 - anyone know about ripping DVDs?

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JPSmit

JPSmit

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For years I have planned to rip all my DVD's onto an NAS drive and I am part way through. But of course I have questions.

1. I am using MakeMKV to rip the DVDs. - so far so good.

2. Unfortunately they are showing up with the subtitles.

3. Interweb says use Handbrake to transcode the videos and remove the subtitles

4. I used handbrake directly on one DVD but it took four hours!

So my questions

1. Is there an easier way? (preferably freeware)

2. Do I need to go back and transcode earlier DVDs? even if they don't show the subtitles? (IE in laymans terms what does transcoding do?)

thanks all!
JP
 
Check your player, there should be a way to turn off subtitles that aren't "forced", even if they are in the MKV. They take up almost no room in the MKV, so no real need to delete them.

I'm not familiar with MakeMKV, but from their on-line help it looks pretty easy to de-select subtitles if you want to. Just clear the check boxes next to whatever you don't want.
https://www.makemkv.com/onlinehelp/

FFMPEG is free, and can do things like delete subtitles (if you still want to do that). As long as you let it copy the other tracks directly (no transcoding), it runs very fast. Transcoding (converting video and audio tracks to a different codec, etc) takes a lot longer of course. Basically, it has to "play" the file internally, and then re-encode what gets shown. I think it might still be faster than Handbrake, though.
http://ffmpeg.org/download.html
Unfortunately it's a command-line utility, and can be somewhat daunting to use. I've created a bunch of scripts to do the things I want to do most often; but I generally use Handbrake or an old (paid) copy of Nero Recode for ripping DVD images.
 
I haven't had run times like that with Handbrake either, but might be due to his trying to eliminate the subtitles. Must do it as it goes rather than just ignoring the track. I use VLC player to play things and just go into the subtitle tab and turn it off.
 
I haven't tried to time it, but HB often takes a long time for me. Especially when starting with a Blu-Ray image. Of course, I don't have the fastest CPU in the world and "only" 16Gb of RAM (remember when 640K was enough for anybody?) But Nero runs noticeably faster, just doesn't always offer the options I want.

Either way, I just fire it up and let it run in background while doing other things.

A friend of mine used to say that the faster computers get, the more time we spend waiting on them.
 
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