Now that all the extended editions of the Hobbit are out, I took my first journey into 3-D movies by buying the 3-D extended edition set. I don't own a 3-D TV, and I am blind in one eye. So my wife and son have been testing for me with coloured glasses.
The first think I noticed is on a 3-D disc all the titles are labeled as MVC by MakeMKV, but most are not. If I try to make them viewed in 3-D anyway, the Mede8er gets confused and displays absolute garbage...
Next I noticed horrible stuttering when attempting to play 3-D movies ripped with Makemkv directly. A 31 GB file simply does not stream well across the network. My past tests showed plugging in a disk to the Mede8er does no better than across my network. It the bitrate is too high, it will still stutter.
So I needed a way to compress the 3-D movies. My first attempt was of course to process them the same way I do 2-D movies, which is MakeMKV and then Handbrake. The results look absolutely stunning. Unfortunately, the results are just 2-D.
Solution: BDtoAVCHD. This is one of the few programs I can find that can reencode MVC movies and leave them as MVC. So I don't have create both a 3-D and a 2-D version of the movie, and the movie can be reduced to a more managable bitrate. Now it turns out there are a few tricks I had to learn to get it right.
1. When BDtoAVCHD recognizes a 3-D movie, it will show a 3-D logo. It turns out BDtoAVCHD will never recognize a MKV as 3-D. So instead of ripping with MakeMKV I need to rip with DVDFab.
2. Once you have a 3-D movie loaded, click on the 3-D movie and select MVC output. This will automatically change the output to BD-25.
3. In most cases BD-25 will do no additional compression. If you select a lower bitrate, it will simply be ignored. So you need to select AVCHD BD-9.
4. Often the bitrate auto selected is too low. If you try and use too low of a bitrate your results will not be playable, or even copyable. I use at least 12000, and that seems to work.
5. Once you have the ISO file created by BDtoAVCHD, mount it and use MakeMKV to convert it to an MKV.
The final movie will be smaller for at least two reasons:
1. You probably used a bitrate that reduced the quality.
2. Your audio was probably down converted to DTS Core. Unless you have a really good receiver and speakers, you won't know the difference...
If you want afterwards you can try using mkv tools to swap around tracks from the raw file, or do different audio conversions. In my tests I find VLC can play the movies fine in 2-D. The mede8er seems to be able to play the 3-D. The windows 10 film player app fails to output any of the audio...
I have not done complete testing, or even just sat down to watch the movies I ripped in 2-D, since that is what I can see. My main goal here was to future proof myself, so I don't have to dig the discs and re-rip them if your next TV is a 3-D TV...
I would appreciate comments on other ways to do effectively the same thing, as I find this conversion is horrible slow, and I don't really like using bitrate encoding instead of quality factor encoding.
