BluRay TV dub to DVD, elderly in-law edition
February 5, 2020 6:26 PM Subscribe
What's the easiest/cheapest way to take a unencrypted Bluray disc and make several copies to DVD?
My lovely wife's parents receive BluRay discs of their other daughter's concert performances dubbed from Japanese broadcast television. They very much look like someone pressed record on a bluray recorder and manually snagged the broadcast (commercials and everything). Naturally they would like to share this with friends far and wide. This turns into a 30+ hour ordeal of playback with a bluray player into a usb video capture device, handbreak to a DVD format, burn multiple copies with a DVDR drive. It is making her sad. Also, inevitably they'll receive the requested number of DVDs (3 or 4) and then think of five more people who'd they'd like to send a copy to a few weeks later.
It's 2020. Nobody should be doing this. Free video hosting sites are not an option because it's not an option (we've suggested, they insist on shipping a physical object).
Not interested in the legality of dubbing Japanese broadcasts, assume filial piety overrules international copyright in this instance.
Thanks!
My lovely wife's parents receive BluRay discs of their other daughter's concert performances dubbed from Japanese broadcast television. They very much look like someone pressed record on a bluray recorder and manually snagged the broadcast (commercials and everything). Naturally they would like to share this with friends far and wide. This turns into a 30+ hour ordeal of playback with a bluray player into a usb video capture device, handbreak to a DVD format, burn multiple copies with a DVDR drive. It is making her sad. Also, inevitably they'll receive the requested number of DVDs (3 or 4) and then think of five more people who'd they'd like to send a copy to a few weeks later.
It's 2020. Nobody should be doing this. Free video hosting sites are not an option because it's not an option (we've suggested, they insist on shipping a physical object).
Not interested in the legality of dubbing Japanese broadcasts, assume filial piety overrules international copyright in this instance.
Thanks!
Have you looked into ripping the BluRay direct to your PC? If it's not encrypted then it should* be possible if you buy a PC BluRay drive. If you have a spare PC tower you could swap the DVD drive out with a cheap BluRay drive, which would save you the laborious ripping process, though not the DVD printing process.
* nb I haven't done this personally
posted by BungaDunga at 7:10 PM on February 5, 2020 [1 favorite]
* nb I haven't done this personally
posted by BungaDunga at 7:10 PM on February 5, 2020 [1 favorite]
(by cheap I mean, $60-100 by the looks of it)
posted by BungaDunga at 7:10 PM on February 5, 2020
posted by BungaDunga at 7:10 PM on February 5, 2020
MakeMKV will let you rip a Blu-ray to a PC for free.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 7:17 PM on February 5, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 7:17 PM on February 5, 2020 [1 favorite]
Are you still in SE Minnesota as your profile indicates? There are a couple of video transfer/duplication services in Rochester that could do this for you and save all the trouble of ripping the blu-ray and making DVD duplicates. Here’s one of them. If they can’t do it there are many similar businesses in the Twin Cities that could.
posted by theory at 7:53 PM on February 5, 2020
posted by theory at 7:53 PM on February 5, 2020
a 30+ hour ordeal of playback with a bluray player into a usb video capture device
is Doing It Wrong.
What should be happening instead is a straight rip from a PC-connected BluRay drive to a Matroska file on a PC hard disk, being sure to change only the container format and copy, rather than re-code, the existing encoded video and audio streams from inside it; this will typically run many times faster than playback speed, as well as being the kind of thing you can kick off and come back to later when it's done. I'd just use ffmpeg for this but I'm sure Handbrake could be persuaded to do it as well.
Any PC that already has an inbuilt SATA DVD-RW drive can easily have that switched out for a BluRay-capable mechanism at quite reasonable cost, or they can hook one up externally via USB3.
Obviously the sane way to distribute the resulting single video files is to upload them to YouTube, keeping them set as private so that only people sent the link can view them, thereby flying under the radar for Google's notoriously overzealous copyright enforcement bots.
But assuming the physical object they insist on shipping doesn't actually need to be a disc, copying video to cheap generic USB thumb drives is a fair bit faster than burning them to DVD. The bottleneck is usually the write speed of the thumb drives themselves, so filling up all available USB ports with thumb drives and kicking off overlapping file copies to each one can save a lot of time.
posted by flabdablet at 4:10 AM on February 6, 2020 [5 favorites]
is Doing It Wrong.
What should be happening instead is a straight rip from a PC-connected BluRay drive to a Matroska file on a PC hard disk, being sure to change only the container format and copy, rather than re-code, the existing encoded video and audio streams from inside it; this will typically run many times faster than playback speed, as well as being the kind of thing you can kick off and come back to later when it's done. I'd just use ffmpeg for this but I'm sure Handbrake could be persuaded to do it as well.
Any PC that already has an inbuilt SATA DVD-RW drive can easily have that switched out for a BluRay-capable mechanism at quite reasonable cost, or they can hook one up externally via USB3.
Obviously the sane way to distribute the resulting single video files is to upload them to YouTube, keeping them set as private so that only people sent the link can view them, thereby flying under the radar for Google's notoriously overzealous copyright enforcement bots.
But assuming the physical object they insist on shipping doesn't actually need to be a disc, copying video to cheap generic USB thumb drives is a fair bit faster than burning them to DVD. The bottleneck is usually the write speed of the thumb drives themselves, so filling up all available USB ports with thumb drives and kicking off overlapping file copies to each one can save a lot of time.
posted by flabdablet at 4:10 AM on February 6, 2020 [5 favorites]
+1 to flabdablet's answer, with the added caveat that if the DVDs that are being sent out need to be authored as DVD-Video for playback in a DVD player (that's the impression I get from the OP) then a transcode would be necessary, though it would still be much faster and higher quality than the OP's current method.
However, if they're computer-readable data DVDs with files in them, then source BD > ffmpeg > remuxed MKV files > burn to DVD is indeed the ideal workflow.
posted by Bangaioh at 10:07 AM on February 6, 2020 [2 favorites]
However, if they're computer-readable data DVDs with files in them, then source BD > ffmpeg > remuxed MKV files > burn to DVD is indeed the ideal workflow.
posted by Bangaioh at 10:07 AM on February 6, 2020 [2 favorites]
if the DVDs that are being sent out need to be authored as DVD-Video for playback in a DVD player (that's the impression I get from the OP) then a transcode would be necessary
Quite so. And the right way to do that is from a non-transcoded Matroska file on a PC hard disk to a DVD ISO image file, also on hard disk (DVD Flick is easy free software that will do this). Then the burning process becomes just another copy (ISO image to DVD disc) that goes as fast as these things possibly can.
posted by flabdablet at 6:12 PM on February 6, 2020 [1 favorite]
Quite so. And the right way to do that is from a non-transcoded Matroska file on a PC hard disk to a DVD ISO image file, also on hard disk (DVD Flick is easy free software that will do this). Then the burning process becomes just another copy (ISO image to DVD disc) that goes as fast as these things possibly can.
posted by flabdablet at 6:12 PM on February 6, 2020 [1 favorite]
If you've done none of this type of stuff before, this previous thread may be interesting:
How can I put Youtube videos onto a DVD? - burn | Ask MetaFilter
I'm pretty sure Handbrake does the read blueray to hard disk. Then one of the authoring tools would let you put menus and do some cuts if needed. It would also do the transcoding needed to play on most DVD players. It would be best to write the final DVD to a file on the hard disk rather than just write it directly to a DVD. Then when you need a new copy just burn that image onto another DVD.
posted by zengargoyle at 6:56 AM on February 7, 2020
How can I put Youtube videos onto a DVD? - burn | Ask MetaFilter
I'm pretty sure Handbrake does the read blueray to hard disk. Then one of the authoring tools would let you put menus and do some cuts if needed. It would also do the transcoding needed to play on most DVD players. It would be best to write the final DVD to a file on the hard disk rather than just write it directly to a DVD. Then when you need a new copy just burn that image onto another DVD.
posted by zengargoyle at 6:56 AM on February 7, 2020
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If all you have is a Bluray there are lots of home video transfer services that will do everything you describe and send you one or several DVDs. Sadly I do no t have one that I recommend, but they do exist. This is by far the easiest.
The cheapest is to do what you describe at home.
posted by GuyZero at 6:42 PM on February 5, 2020