Enhanced AAC

Well, the DVD writer in my iMac died over the holidays, so I need to order an external Blu-ray player sooner rather than later! In the meantime, I downloaded the MakeMKV software and tried it out using my Mac mini (the HTPC) that still has an operational DVD player. It looks good! Real good. I did several DVDs, both commerical and some DVD+R’s that I used to back up TiVoed movies. My HTPC is built around Plex instead of Apple TV; as I suspected, Plex can “see” MKV files directly. I just put the MKV file in one of the folders that Plex already “knows” about and it automatically catalogs it, downloads the metadata, and the cover art. I’m developing a little bit different process than what Ara described. I like DVD commentary tracks and supplemental features, so I’m just grabbing most everything in the one MakeMKV run. In contrast to Ara’s process, I’m checking what MakeMKV selected to make sure that it selected *all* the commentary tracks & special features. A MakeMKV run is much faster than Handbrake — probably because it is not compressing anything — so it is no big deal to just grab everything you want. If the DVD contains several different video files, MakeMKV automatically creates separate files. You can rename them so you can tell them apart and group all the files for a DVD into a folder. In Plex, you can display the catalog by folder; you group the files by DVD in this way. A nice feature of Plex is that you can choose the audio track at playback time. If you keep more than one audio track, you will get a pop-up menu with the available audio tracks. In this way, the one MKV file works as a “universal” movie file. You can also have MakeMKV keep the subtitles. I prefer the original language audio but the English subtitles. Using VLC, I verified that the requested subtitles are stored in the MKV file. Plex also has an option to choose a subtitle track at playback time, but it doesn’t work right. I can select the desired audio track and the desired subtitle track, but Plex munges up the subtitles. That part has to wait for a bug fix or try to figure this out. It looks like a textencoding problem The other issue with the MKV files is that they are so large that some don’t stream to the iOS devices without stuttering. They play on the HDTV great, but that is a wired connection. To get wireless going flawlessly for every movie, I’d need to proceed to Step 3 and transcode the MKV to mp4/H264 using Handbrake. Unfortunately, the whole theee-step process is real time consuming. The resulting .mp4 is about half the size of the MKV but it streams perfectly to iPad and iPhone. On the other hand, sometimes the MKV streams to my iPhone or iPad perfectly, so I need to figure this out better. Perhaps I only need to get a wireless extender nearer the iOS device (I’ve got an Airport Extreme in a different room). I suppose that using Plex is the solution to Ara’s problem of preserving the Blu-ray video and audio quality for digital media. It gives you everying and at full quality. With Plex, you can truly put the disks into deep storage. But it all works! I can see that it is far from being ready for the mass-market, but it has an extremely high coolness factor for mac geeks, despite what PC pundits think. http://www.maccast.com/2011/12/23/maccast-2011-12-23-blu-ray-and-mac-home-theater/