easy / advanced guide High Quality BD Bluray encoding / encode (Hybrid & other GUIs)

Hi, everyone since i am new to this site i though i could write a helpfull guide on how to

start with encoding, easy / advanced.

I will make it as short as possible, if anything is unclear feel free to ask here or pm me.


1. - What you need and where to get it?

i recommend this GUIs:

- DVDFAB (find cracked Version on warez sites, needed for retail bluray discs and good for

.iso to bdmv folder - should be easy to find on google)
- Hybrid (various video / audio encoders, incl. x264/5, x264/5-10bit, FLAC, AAC, Subtitles

and chapters etc., it combines nearly everything you need and more)
- MKVToolNix (for Remuxing , adding Audio, Video, Subs, Chapters or whatever to an .mkv

container file)
- AudioMuxer (for DTS-HD-MA Tracks to Wav/Flac with Arcsoft Decoder - see below for more

explaination)
- foobar2000 (great for audio encoding)
- foobar2000 free encoder pack
- suprip / subtitle edit (if you plan to convert PGS / .sup to SRT/ASS)

links:

Hybrid https://www.videohelp.com/software/Hybrid
MKVToolNix https://www.videohelp.com/software/MKVtoolnix
AudioMuxer https://www.videohelp.com/software/AudioMuxer
foobar2000 https://www.videohelp.com/software/foobar2000
free encoder packhttp://www.foobar2000.org/encoderpack
suprip https://www.videohelp.com/software/SupRip
subtitle edi https://www.videohelp.com/software/Subtitle-Edit

all this software is legal and free.


you can find (nearly) everything on videohelp.com , search on the site or search google with

a name from a needed programm or Programm + videohelp on google.


2. Use DVDfab to create a bdmv folder from reatail copy or .iso

After starting DVDFab, your disc or image is loaded automatically from your drive/virtual

drive you should click on the copy tab
There is a disc symbol on the left, click and choose complete option, then on start (right

bottom corner) and bdvm folder will be created.

bdmv folder has only 2 interesting subfolders - stream and playlist

[stream] contains the .m2ts video/audio/sub stream data
[playlist] contains the .mpls data that will start episodes or movies with playlist file

when starting .m2ts - chapters are not available, thats what the playlists are for.


3. Your Video material

Most Blu-rays will have h264 video with very high bitrate (30000-40000 kbit/s), you can also

find MPEG2 or VC-1 on Blurays.
Bluray videos normally have a fps (frames per second) rate with 23.976 frames and

progressive picture scan-type.
Some Videos might have 29.976 frames, these videos are interlaced and not progressive
(1080p = progressive / 1080i = interlaced)

When you have interlaced material you should deinterlace it - use hybrid auto detection)
You can also find 25 fps (PAL) interlaced or progressive material (most is progressive)
But most material should be 23.976 fps and progressive that you will find on a bluray.

Interlacing is visibel when you watch fast scenes on HD screens, it was made for old bigger

TVs, broadcasting and is standard for DVDs
google: interlacing or combing artefacts.

Artefacting in your untouched BD Source:
There might be visibel artefacting, like
banding (8 bit gradiants cause these artefact type - typical for anime content)
small blocking (take a close look at moving parts mostly on lower bitrate sources, or poor

upslaced content)
ringing artefacts and/or haloing can appear on to sharp/sharpened (upscaled) material, shows

as ringing lines or haloing - dark/white rings around edges
just to name a few.

There is a lot to know about artefacts, just google for video artefacts to find out more.

You might find some very grainy sources, grain isn't artefacting its typical for all real

live material shot with analog film, while can cause blocking sometimes (as all videos on BD

are not lossless anyway)
Grain costs a lot of bitrate, but is also an element of quality for a lot encoder.

You can also remove artefacts ´with some usefull filters.

4. The encoding GUI

- Hybrid / x264 encoder
i testet many encoder guis (incl. megui, staxrip, handbrake, etc.), hybrid should have

anything you need, updates coming every 2 mounths, it have a very good support for any kind

of questions to the programm, encoders, settings etc. (search on google: selur forum)
The Hybrid GUI is also selfexplaining - just hold the mouse curser on an element and it

gives you an explaining text to nearly everything.

When you have installed and started Hybrid you could nearly start with encoding and ignore

the following parts as the GUI is selfexplaining.
but it should be helpfull anyway to learn the important things first.

The Hybrid GUI has these Tabs:

Main / x264 (or any other encoder) / Crop/Resize / Filtering / Subtitle / Audio / Chapter /

Config / Jobs / Log

First thing you should do is to click on Filtering and remove auto search for interlacing

(activate this only when you know your source is interlaced)
-auto detecting interlacing works and tries to find the best deinterlacing methods, you can

set various parameters for the different interlacers, while often doesn't use best but

standard settings of the selected deinterlacer.
(try the auto detection out when you have interlaced material)
But that should be rare on Blurays.

Second go to config > container settings > standard output container (left top corner)

choose mkv, matroska can handle much more types of streams.

You can save your settings (right bottom corner) save > all (or what you want to save else)

Back on the Main Tab you can load your source material (bdmv) directly from .m2ts data by

clicking on the input file (big arrow sign on the right)
or from playlist files by first activating the Blu-ray input (i prefer .m2ts data)
You can also choose every other videomaterial or audio.

When your Material is loaded (can take some a bit time) choose x264 under video handling (i

will focus here more an x264, as its best for high quality bluray rips - use x265 only for

4k rips or very low bitrate encodes as x265 is designed more for this)

Then go to the tab x264 and choose advanced instead of simple.
You now have access to all of x264 parameter settings.

5. x264 / encoding

There are different ways to encode:
CRF (constand rate factor) mode (quality based 1pass encoding)
CQ constant quantizer (quality based 1pass encoding)
spicific filesize 2pass encoding

which to use?
For Quality encodes use CRF or CQ, you simply set a quality level - but be warned CQ

disables some usefull features you will only have with CRF mode.
CRF is using a paramter called qcomp, and also Adaptive quantization, CRF should be the best

way for good quality encodes. The idea behind qcomp is it to get better quality at static

scenes where you will notice the higher quality better, while losing slighty quality on

faster scenes or overall more complexy frames/frameparts where you won't notice it that

much.

Use 2pass encodes only when you want a specific filesize (like BD50 > BD25)
use firstpass as fast or you will do the same encode twice just to get a specific filesize.
This mode is a bit more usefull for movies, but if you have made some tests with CRF mode

you will be able to get an overview about the filesizes that will come out.

For good quality encodes try CRF values between 16 and 20 and see what is the best for you

and the filesize.
Higher CRF means less quality but also less bitrate.

- How to get the best settings for x264 encoding -

The truth here is that there are no best settings, its depeding on how much details or

metric quality YOU want, what material you have (anime or film, grain etc.)
and many other factors that you might want or not.
Also how much time you want to spend for encoding.
You might want to make an encode for spefic system which has a level cap (Bluray Player

using level 4.1 for example)

Most of the x264 parameters doesn't effect quality that much.
There is a official Preset system included to make things easy.
you can choose this under presets in x264 main tab.

Presets like slower, very slow or even placebo raising the compression and/or quality, so

you can't make something wrong here by simply choosing better (slower) presets.
But Placebo takes very much time, best would it be to use very slow for any encodes if you

have the time, or if you have more time use placebo if you want to.

Then there is the tuning system, which can be useful to set other parameters for specific

content.

tune: animation, film, grain and stillimages, also others like ssim and psnr (which you

don't need), they are just for calculating metric scores that doesn't say anything about

quality with Psy elements enabled (and you want those always enabled unless you are making

super low anime bitrate encodes)

Hybrid will give you info about the tunings and the parameters that will be changed if you

want to know more.
you can also use your own tuning which is sometimes more recommendable. But needs testing.

you should start to try out the effects of some paramters that you can find under the

quantization tab:

Adaptive quantisation (try out the extremes 0 and 2)
PsyRDo/Trellis (try out with 0 and highest again)
just to see the difference.
PsyRDo & PsyTrellis are different settings.

PsyRD improves subjective quality to the human eye, lower PsyRD uses objective metrics.
PsyRd is more usefull for real live footage, but also doesn't hurt animes with slighty

higher settings (try 0.5 - 0-8 for anime and 0.9-1.2 for real live material)
Psy Trellis is used to retain more details or to retain or sharper look for details, Trellis

itself has also 3 differnt settings.
0-2 - 0 don't use trellis, 1 use trellis sometimes and 2 use trellis always, trellis 2 will

be activated with slower presets automatically.
You need trellis to set to 1 to use PsyTrellis.
Trellis is deadzone parameter, blocks might throw away picture information if its to

unefficent - you can get such elemnts back by using PsyTrellis, but with small lose of

overall quality. It can also casue artefacting, thats why it es set to 0 with no tuning.

If you want to use higher PsyRD/trellis a lower CRF is needed to avoid any artefacts.
You can also use lower PsyRD to avoid artefacting from PsyTrellis - i would recommend not to

use to much PsyTrellis, 0.2 is already relative high, but for higher CRF its to much.

Hybrid will help you here to find more out about the effects, but always try out yourself

and see it with your own eyes.
Thats important to get an overview.


8 bit and 10 bit encoding.

8 bit is standard and needed only for compatibilty with other devices.
10 bit encoding will always improve your quality, or help you to avoid banding while

encoding.
it also will have better quality at lower filesizes.
You can choose 10bit under calculation precision in the x264 main tab.

Here you can also choose your AVC Profile / level, if you you plan to do 10bit encodes you

also need to choose the Profile high10 and set level to unregistered, the level will then

set at the lowest level that is possible with your encoding settings.
If you make an 1080p rip with 10bit and veryslow preset you will have a level 5.1 videofile.
and even with 720p you will have level 5.0, so not even that fits for most devices, but is

great for PC watching.

you can also remove artefacts, but its not really needed for most sources, check the filtering tab from hybrid and then avisynth to find some great filters for artefact removing, you can also remove grain to save bitrate, try it out a bit to see what you can do with these filters.


6. Audio encoding.

You can choose to use hybrid for the audio es well or use the other listed programms.
if you want lossless audio use flac.
for best lossy audio i would use the quicktime / itunes AAC encoder with TVBR mode (its the

most recommended encoder)

WARNING - last time i have checked this was last year, but hybrid for some reasons can't get

the true channel positions of multchannel streams with FLAC
but for AAC its no problem, its an flac only problem.

to be able to use quicktime AAC you have to download and install itunes to get the apple

applcation support installed.

if you want to encode audio with hybrid click on the main tab and select under audio

handling > custom

to encode audio with foobar2000 (foobar will get the correct channel mapping for

multichannel audio, its also very easy to use)
all you need to do is to put PCM/AWAV audio files into the playlist and right click >

convert > choose output format, make sure you have installed the free encoder pack.
choose FLAC > edit level8 for best compression, use bit depth > auto, dither never (dither

is needed only for 24 to 16 bit conversions), remove any other audio "processing" (not in

flac options in the overall convert options)

choose AAC (Apple) and edit > VBR use the quality level you want)
highest AAC quality is level 127, 109 or maybe lower should be enough too) you won't save

much bitrate here anyway, but don't go below level 91 to keep good quality.
There are 15 quality levels for AAC (Apple)
you can choose quality level 95 (in hybrid) for example but it will be 91 or choose level 96

and it will be level 100.

7. start encoding

to start an encode you have do look in the main tab of hybrid and choose an ouput name.
click on the big arrow on the right site in the middle.

when you already set mkv as standard ouput format .mkv is added to your file name

automatically. you can also choose other output formats, like .raw this will output raw data

streams, can be usefull sometimes (if mkvtoolnix borks with PCM audio for example).

Then click on the symbol under the small working man symbol to add an job to the queue and

then on the working man to get the job started.

8. MKVToolNix

i will make this short, MKVToolNix is THE GUI to use for remux or packing

audio/video/subtitle streams into an .mkv container. and a lot of other things too.

For remux go into the playlist bdmv folder and choose the file that opens the right movie,

episode or whatever you want from the bluray to be remuxed,
all you need to do is to drop the playlist file into mkvtoolnix gui, a window will open,

choose don't scan or click the x of the window and select video/audio/subtitle streams you

want.

It can be not so easy to find the playlist files or subtitles you want. just take the time

to find what you want to remux.

You can also remux from .m2ts data but won't have chapters then.

while acking together finished audio, video, subtitle streams just put them all together

into mkvtoolnix, add names,languages or whatever is needed/wanted to the streams.

Maybe you want to give your movie file a moviename or add delays while dub/sub source a with

audio from source b, mkvtoolnix has a lot of tools but thats what you need to know in the

first place.

When you are ready just click on multiplex.

you should find much more if you google mkvtoolnix instructions or specific problems.

9. Subtitles

Subtiles on Blurays are PGS / .sup subtitles, to convert them i recommend you suprip for

manual OCR, that takes a lot of time or use subtitle edit OCR method with Tesseract Engine,

but this causes spell errors missing elements and so on, still relativ usefull, there are no

real good subtitle GUIs.

Just keep your PGS Subs, the Quality is good enough and they don't come with big file sizes

anyway.
Or look for already existing SRT and ASS files.

10. Synchronizing Source A and B

if you want to have synchron audio or subtitle it gets a bit complex.
For Audio dubs use any wavform editor, like creative wave studio, getting synchron PGS is a

bit more complex, you will need MKVtoolnix and set delays, but i guess i will make a new

post just for dubs and subs to explain that in a full version, its also only needed for

multiple sources, what isn't always the best for some sources.
And it takes very much time too.


So thats it for now.

i hope this guide could help some people maybe getting better ratios by uploading their own high quality BD rips.

But there is a lot more to know, but to much to write in one post.

I will try to make some more specific posts here, if you like them i will be happy to get some likes or reps.

for more info about encoding search doom9 forum, but be warned there are A LOT posts,

x264 is still in developement, like most other guis mentioned, so keep your software updated
(you will find updated version on videohelp.com as soon as they are out)

This is great info.

thanks @jthaman - i will try to improve it one day - it took around 6 hours to write it :) i also would like to share some information about how to use the x264 parameters for different sources of video material (anime, film, grain). But that could take much more time to explain :) i already read 1000s of doom9 threads and made tests over months.
So i can say a lot about it :) guess i will start with one part, because otherwise i don't expact that much people will read it.

thank you, this looks like a very usefull guide i like it: also already started encoing with handbrake, but hybrid seems to be a much more complex programm - guess i will try it out soon.

Great Guide, thanks for sharing. Been using handbrake for many years, going to try out these other programs