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transcode-video

2019 iMac vs Late 2014 iMac—Ripping addendum

In Part 1 of my 2014 vs 2019 iMac comparison articles, I provided an overview and a number of comparison benchmark results. In Part 2, I looked at changes in gaming performance between the two machines.

But there was one more thing I wanted to do: Compare Blu-ray ripping speeds. At the time, though, I didn't have any new movies to rip, and I really didn't want to spend the time re-ripping an existing movie. Now, though, I do have a few new movies to rip, as I'm trying to finish our collection of all the films in the first three phases (now called the Infinity Saga) of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

That meant buying the films I'd liked the least—The Incredible Hulk and the first two Thor movies. With that came the chance to compare the Blu-ray ripping speed of the two iMacs. I use the method described in my article Revisiting ripping Blu-ray discs, which is this:

  1. Use MakeMKV to create an MKV file on the hard drive that contains the video and audio tracks.
  2. Use Don Melton's Video Transcoding tools to create the final movie from the MKV file.

Using The Incredible Hulk, I timed how long it took to create the MKV file and how long it took to create the finished movie. Without further ado, the results (times are in hh:mm:ss format)…

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Get more details from transcode-video

While working on my massive Blu-ray ripping comparison, I wanted more information about what some of the transcode-video presets were doing. That is, if you pick --target big, exactly what settings are being used to rip the video?

It turns out there's --dry-run option for transcode-video that will tell you exactly that. (I've added some line breaks for readability here.)

What's neat is that you can also use this to see what the default options are for transcode-video when you don't supply it with any options. Just use the --dry-run parameter option but leave off any of the presets (i.e. --target big), and the output will show you the defaults.

In addition, you can use it on already-ripped media to get their details as well, regardless as to how you ripped the movie.

In a related vein, I was having issues with the above rip, because I thought that the surround sound track wasn't being ripped. Again, thanks to Don, I learned about a second command line option for transcode-video that reveals exactly what's in a ripped video.

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A deep dive into HandBrake and Video Transcoding

An obvious interest area of mine is in ripping (and watching) movies using my Mac. I've talked about everything from installing the tools I use to how I rip to how to make sure I update the ripping tools. And though I've included some comparison pictures in the how-I-rip article, I've never done a deep dive into the various ripping options and how they compare on three key fronts:

  • Speed: Faster is better; measured in minutes required to rip.
  • Size: Smaller is better; measured in MB of drive space used.
  • Quality: Higher is better; the closer the image quality is to the original, the better.

An ideal rip would be one that happens in seconds, saves into a 10KB file, and has quality matching the original. The reality, though, is far from the ideal. Ripping a movie involves making trade-offs between those three competing measures: Maximizing any one measure requires some sort of tradeoff with one or both of the other measures.

After ripping so many DVDs and Blu-rays over the years, I was curious about how HandBrake and Don Melton's Video Transcoding tools handle those tradeoffs, so I decided to do some testing.

If you'd like to see what I discovered about ripping time, file sizes, and—with lots and lots of frame grabs—image quality, keep reading…

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