Hi,
Can the WD Live handle bluray iso’s that have 40mbps+ bitrate? Is the playback smooth or is there a limit to the bitrate that the WD Live can handle?
Many thanks
It would be unlikely that it could handle such a rate even when played from a directly attached USB drive.
OTOH, you are unlikely to find many blu-rays with that rate – note that currently 36mbps is the maximum transfer rate allowed for 1x blu-rays (almost all discs on the market are 1x). Most blu-rays seldom hit the maximum and certainly not for sustained periods of time.
The Live plays nearly all directly ripped blu-rays from a local drive just fine – that’s not the issue. The issue is trying to stream such files, particularly wirelessly. In that case, re-encoding is recommended.
When re-encoding how do you preserve 24p? Also, how do you know if the bluray is 24p? Are they all 24p?
24p is preserved if you re-encode it correctly. BDInfo, I believe, will give you this info on a Playlist by Playlist basis. But, regardless of its framerate, it’ll be preserved if you follow the below steps.
- Rip the BD using AnyDVD or DVDFab.
- Use BDInfo software to determine which “Playlist” on the Blu-Ray contains the main feature.
- Use TSMuxer to pull out the main feature by loading the Playlist you determine from Step 2. This will create a single M2TS file that contains the whole movie.
- Load the resulting M2TS file into HANDBRAKE. Use the HIGH PROFILE preset, select MKV Output, and select whichever AUDIO Tracks you want. This will output an MKV that’s 60-70% smaller than the original M2TS. This step will take HOURS and HOURS, so do it while you sleep.
If you don’t care about subtitles, you’re done. If you DO want the subtitles:
- Use TSMuxer to pull out the subtitle tracks you want to discrete files. Takes a minute or two.
- Use BDSup2Sub to convert those files to “IDX” format. This can take 10s of minutes depending on the number of subtitle “frames.”
- Use MKVMerge to mux the resulting subtitle files back into the MKV you created in Step 4. This takes seconds to minutes depending on the size of the file.
Just to add to what Tony has said, BDInfo will show you IF a playlist is needed – most of the time it won’t. Most of the time the largest M2TS file on the blu-ray is all you need. Disney films and a few others will use a playlist that consists of more than one M2TS file and that’s when you need TsMuxer (I’d say about 95% of the time all you need do is just the largest M2TS file).
And how long it takes to encode is directly related to the speed of your machine. On my i7 it does a blu-ray in near real time (that is, about three hours for a two hour movie). On an older machine it can take 6 or 7 times as long (you can reduce the time by changing options in Handbrake but this will reduce the quality and/or embiggen the file).
My main PC is an i7 860 so hopefully it won’t be too bad
