Generally, working with these video tools is easier on Mac or Linux. Your best bet on Windows is setting up WSL with whatever is the most recent Ubuntu long term support release. This can be somewhat twiddly, and might be easier to just do your video conversion on a Mac or Linux box.

Required Software⌗

Optional Hardware⌗

Setup⌗

  1. Install all tools listed in requirements

Process⌗

  1. Use MakeMKV to rip UHD Blu-ray (make sure to select the video/audio/subtitle tracks that are desired)
  2. Run detect-crop on resulting MKV file
    1. If there is a disagreement between handbrake and ffmpeg, use mpv to preview
  3. Run transcode-video on MKV file
    • If detect-crop showed needed crops, add --crop t:b:l:r option
    • If converting for future editing, add --target big option to gain 50% in target bitrate. You can also use --preset slow to preserve as much quality as possible, but it will dramatically increase processing time.
    • By default it will take the main audio track and burn in any subtitles that are marked as forced in the stream. This will preserve English subtitles for Foreign language sections of English movies (see The Martian and Hunt for Red October). If other tracks are desired, check the transcode-video documentation for information on including any tracks you want, and/or burning in subtitle tracks. (Instructions)