Using MPlayer & Mencoder to Rip Blu-ray

Blu-ray discs require new and powerful CPU and graphics card to play high-definition movies on them. Although MPlayer is not yet suitable for playing Blu-ray discs, Mencoder can be used to rip Blu-ray discs in a more watchable format so that you can watch the movie on your average computer, laptop, iPod or iPad. I blogged previously on using Mencoder to rip DVD. Ripping Blu-ray isn't much different from ripping DVD.

Since Blu-ray discs are encrypted, you need to use DumpHD, Clown_BD or AnyDVD HD to dump the contents of your Blu-ray disc to your hard drive prior to ripping it. If you have Slysoft AnyDVD HD installed, right-click on the red fox icon on the right side of the taskbar, and choose Rip Video DVD to Harddisk from the menu. Then, specify the location where you want to save unencrypted Blu-ray contents. Note that you'll need more than 20GB free space.

After saving the huge amount of Blu-ray contents, open Command Prompt and type mplayer commands to play the Blu-ray movie. Here are some examples:

• VC-1 video and AC-3 audio
  
  

  mplayer E:\BDMV\STREAM\00024.m2ts -vo directx:accel -vc ffvc1 -ao dsound -ac ffac3 -aid 4352 -framedrop

  
  
• H.264 video and AC-3 audio
  
  

  mplayer E:\BDMV\STREAM\00024.m2ts -vo directx:accel -vc ffh264 -ao dsound -ac ffac3 -aid 4352 -framedrop

  
  
• MPEG video and AC-3 audio
  
  

  mplayer E:\BDMV\STREAM\00024.m2ts -vo directx:accel -vc ffmpeg12 -ao dsound -ac ffac3 -aid 4352 -framedrop

To find available audio tracks, type the -identify option for mplayer to create a log file and look for AUDIO_ID strings.

mplayer 00024.m2ts -vo direct3d -vc ffvc1 -vf cropdetect -ss 180 -identify > log.txt

To encode the Blu-ray video with H.263 codec and resize it to 768x432 screen at the same time, the mencoder command would be like:

mencoder 00024.m2ts -o film.h264 -of rawvideo -oac copy -vf scale=768:432,harddup -ofps 24000/1001 -vc ffvc1 -ovc x264 -x264encopts bitrate=1200:subq=4:bframes=3:b_pyramid=normal:weight_b:pass=1:turbo=1

My second-pass mencoder command would be:

mencoder 00024.m2ts -o film.264 -of rawvideo -oac copy -vf scale=768:432,harddup -ofps 24000/1001 -vc ffvc1 -ovc x264 -x264encopts bitrate=1200:8x8dct:me=umh:frameref=4:bframes=3:b_pyramid=normal:weight_b:pass=2:trellis=1:psnr

I like to convert 5.1-channel AC3 audio to 6-channel AAC sound.

mplayer 00024.m2ts -vo null -vc null -aid 4352 -ao pcm:fast:file=audio-en-51.pcm -ac ffac3 -channels 6
faac --mpeg-vers 4 -q 108 -c 16800 -I 2,6 audio-en-51.pcm

Finally, let's put together a Matroska package from the video and audio

mkvmerge --title "Le Film" --default-language fr --chapters Chapters.txt -o le_film.mkv --track-name 0:"Video_Title" --default-duration 0:23.976fps --display-dimensions 0:768x432 --noaudio film.264 --default-track 0 --language 0:fr audio-fr-51.aac