Encoding DVDs with OpenBSD and Handbrake

I used to have a problem buying DVDs. If I saw one that was under $10.00 that I liked (or sort of liked, or had heard of, or thought looked cool) I’d buy it. Too cheap not to buy! My taste in movies is questionable (I’m ok with this) so I’ve amassed a decent collection of 80s action movies mixed with sci-fi, fantasy, and eclectic indie films (like Bubba Hotep).

As a card carrying member of the Computer Nerd Association of America I couldn’t in good faith leave those DVDs on their discs without at least ripping them, so that’s what I did. I didn’t do anything other than rip them, and I’d used various tools over the years to do this so I currently have a folder with .mkv files, and several with VIDEO_TS folders that seem to be a full backup of the DVDs. I didn’t do any compression at the time, so most of these folders are sitting around 6GB each on my JankyNAS.

For some reason (I was likely procrastinating something else I should have been doing), last week I decided to re-encode these and convert them all to mkv files in order to clean up some wasted space and make these easier to move around. I do have a Jellyfin install sitting around to stream media, but I don’t ever use it. Maybe some day.

In any case, the main point of this article is how to take a bunch of folders with VIDEO_TS files in them and convert those into nice, self contained .mkv files.

I installed handbrake on my OpenBSD home server (an old Intel NUC). There was a package for it, so installation was just doas pkg_add handbrake.

That machine is currently hosting grafana, unifi network application, a minecraft instance for my kids, and a photon install for reverse geocoding Dawarich points. It wasn’t really working too hard at all that so I figured it would be a good place to fire and forget multiple hours long encoding jobs. As a benefit it was already connected to my NAS via NFS so I didn’t need to copy files anywhere.

I ran the following command on Ghost Dog - The Way of the Samurai to see how the re-encode would turn out:

HandBrakeCLI \
  -i "Ghost Dog The Way of the Samurai (1999)/VIDEO_TS" \
  -o "Ghost Dog The Way of the Samurai (1999).mkv" \
  --main-feature \
  -e x264 -q 18 \
  --aencoder copy

After waiting for around 5 hours (I have old computers), the processing had completed and I had a file that went from 5.6GB to 1.6GB, not bad in terms of file storage cleanup when you consider there are probably around 50 of these folders sitting around taking up space (56, just counted). I asked Gemini for advice and Gemini suggested that I also use the --encoder-preset fast flag which should speed up my encoding time without a noticeable drop in visual quality (in theory).

I watched the re-encoded DVD and it looked great (I mean, as great as a plain old DVD can look on a 4k monitor) so I dumped the Handbrake command into a loop and am now waiting patiently for the remaining 55 films to complete.

Once this is done, I’ll double check that they are all working properly in Jellyfin and call it a day.

For reference, here’s the loop I’m using in the folder where all my ripped DVDs live:

#!/bin/sh

for d in */; do
  if [ -d "$d/VIDEO_TS" ]; then
    title="${d%/}"

    if [ -f "$title.mkv" ]; then
      echo "Skipping $title — $title.mkv already exists."
      continue
    fi

    echo "=================================================="
    echo "Processing: $title"
    echo "=================================================="

    HandBrakeCLI \
      -i "$d/VIDEO_TS" \
      -o "$title.mkv" \
      --main-feature \
      -e x264 -q 18 --encoder-preset fast \
      --aencoder copy
  fi
done

Gemini also suggests I try the --decomb flag since my source material is DVD. I’ll wait and see how these encodes turn out, and if I see any noticeable artifacts, I’ll give that a try. So far, I haven’t noticed anything out of the ordinary on Ghost Dog or Biutiful.

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