I’ve spent ages trying eliminate an annoying problem whereby Blu-Ray rips played through Media Player gave out a slightly stuttering video picture, whereas DVD rips worked fine. I eventually concluded that this was due to Blu-Rays being encoded at 23.976fps rather than the 25fps seen on PAL DVDs. Apple TV can only output at 25hz or 30hz, which doesn’t match Blu-Ray framerate and so causes the stuttering.
After hours of trying, I seem to found a solution to increase the framerate of the Blu-Ray rips to 25fps which means they play nice and smoothly in PAL. This method does speed up the video and audio by 4% which sounds like a bad thing but is actually the route taken by most DVD manufacturers to achieve the same thing. I know it won’t be for everyone, but for me, this is far better than having a stuttery video.
In case it is helpful to anyone else, here is the process I now go through. Any suggestions for improvements obviously really welcome!
How to rip a Blu-ray disc to a PAL Apple TV
Software needed:
- MakeMKV
- TSMuxer
- Avisynth
- VirtualDubMod
- Eac3to
- Handbrake
Steps to follow:
1. Rip Blu-ray to hard drive using MakeMKV
2. Split video and audio tracks of .mkv file using TSMuxer (only the audio part will actually be used)
Speed up video to 25 fps
3. 3. Create an Avisynth script as follows, where filename.mkv is the original rip
DirectShowSource("filename.mkv")
AssumeFPS(25,1)
4. 4. Process video
· Load Avisynth script into VirtualDubMod
· In Video, Compression menu, choose “ffdshow video codec”
· In Streams, Stream list, disable all the audio tracks
· Save the file as an .mkv (can run in batch mode if you’ve got several to do)
· This saves out the video elements of the file with 25fps and 4% faster (so the file will be slightly shorter in length)
Speed up audio to 25 fps
5. Create an eac3to script as follows, where filename.dts is the audio output of TXMuxer (doesn’t have to be dts). This will create a Dolby Digital sound file at 25fps and 4% faster to match your video file
Eac3to filename.dts filename.ac3 -speedup
6. Remux the video output file and the audio output file using TSMuxer
7. Process the resultant .ts file in Handbrake, using AppleTV settings, but setting Video, Framerate setting to “Same as source” and “Constant”