Don Melton provides some amazing scripts that wrap HandBrake to produce high quality, portable versions of Blu Ray rips. The tools Don provides are written in Ruby, and they're packaged as a Ruby Gem. All the tools are cross platform, requiring only the Ruby runtime to be installed. But they do depend on external programs to get anything useful done. These dependencies are cross platform as well, but Windows has no standard package management system (de facto or otherwise), so installing these dependencies for Windows can be a bit of a pain. But it is possible! Here's how
- HandBrakeCLI
Get version 1.0.1 - ffmpeg, the actual download page for Windows is here
Get the 3.2.2 'static' release. - mkvtoolnix, the actual download page is here
Download the 9.7.1 portable version. It's packaged as a .7z file, I'd recommend using 7zip to open these files - MPlayer r37905, the actual download page is here
I've had problems with some version of MPlayer, so I'd recommend using exactly this version. The direct link to download it is here - MP4v2
Functional Windows binaries for this are hard to find, I've been using this one. If anyone knows of a more official binary, please let me know - RubyInstaller 2.2.6
-
Run the RubyInstaller to install Ruby and be sure to have "Add to path" ticked when you install.
-
Create
C:\bin
and add it to your PATH -
From the Handbrake zip file extract
HandBrakeCLI.exe
toC:\bin
-
From the ffmpeg zip extract
bin/ffmpeg.exe
toC:\bin
-
From the MKVToolNix 7z extract
mkvpropedit.exe
and thedata
directory toC:\bin
-
From the MP4v2 7z extract
libmp4v2.dll
andmp4track.exe
toC:\bin
-
From the MPlayer 7z extract
mplayer.exe
and themplayer
directory toC:\bin
C:\bin
should now contain:- data/
- mplayer/
- ffmpeg.exe
- HandBrakeCLI.exe
- libmp4v2.dll
- mkvpropedit.exe
- mp4track.exe
- mplayer.exe
-
Open CMD and type
gem install video_transcoding
Be sure to give the README a thorough read, as it contains an enourmous amount of information about how to use the tools.
how does one add something to "PATH"?
Create C:\bin and add it to your PATH