BroadcasTheNet

Introduction

What is BatchGuy?

One of my hobbies is to collect full Blu-ray discs and to either remux or encode them. I am a huge fan of TV Shows, so I typically work with multiple discs that contain tv series that can have over 30 episodes.

The problem that I faced is that most of the GUI tools available do not allow you to work with Blu-rays from a batch point of view. This is fine for movies but having to manually work with each stream on each disc for each episode is very tiresome. Because of this, I decided to make my own tool to ease some of the pain.

As I continued to make modifications to BatchGuy, I started to think that this tool could possibly be helpful to other Blu-ray encoders and remuxers such as myself, so I decided to share this tool with the community.

You can find the latest release of BatchGuy on Github here

In this tutorial, I will be showing you how to remux TV Show Blu-ray discs with BatchGuy.

Required Tools and Dependencies

• Windows 7, 8, 10 x64
• Microsoft .Net Framework 4.5+
• MKVToolNix GUI
• eac3to
• Ripped Blu-ray discs
• BatchGuy

Tips Before Starting

• Make sure you know the correct episode order of the TV Show you are encoding
• Make sure you understand the audio and subtitle streams inside of the Blu-ray ie Commentary, SDH, Force Captions etc etc

BatchGuy Tips

• All BatchGuy Grids can be sorted by double-clicking the header row
• The (.batchGuyEac3toSettings) file sits at the heart of BatchGuy, so ensure that you save this file after entering information on each screen

Step 1. Get an untouched TV Blu-ray Disc

You can get an untouched TV Blu-ray disc from BTN, other trackers, Usenet or rip a Blu-ray disc that you purchased.

Step 2. Install MKVToolNix GUI for Windows

BatchGuy will use mkvmerge, which comes with MKVToolNix GUI, to mux in your extracted Blu-ray artifacts. You can find the MKVToolNix GUI Windows installer here

Step 3. Get eac3to

You can get eac3to here. Save and unzip eac3to to the directory of your choosing.

Step 4. Get BatchGuy

The latest version of BatchGuy can be found here. Save and unzip the BatchGuy folder to a directory of your choosing.

Step 5.

Open up BatchGuy and choose Settings. Ensure that all of the exe paths have been specified, choose a Remux Naming Convention Template, set your default BluRay Title Info audio input/output mappings, and defaults for audio and subtitle language and mkvemerge. Once you are done, use the menu located at the top left corner of the screen to save your settings.

Step 6.

Next, on the main menu, choose Create eac3to Batch File

Step 7.

On the Create eac3to Batch File, choose the location where you would like to save your eac3to batch file

Step 8.

Choose whether you want BatchGuy to extract the files in a single directory or in a directory per playlist, based upon the episode number you specify (for this tutorial, directory per playlist has been chosen)

Step 9.

Check the Extract for Remux checkbox at the top of the screen and enter in the Series Name and all the other relevant informaton based upon the Remux Naming Convention Template you chose on the BatchGuy Settings Screen, the mkvemerge batch file location and the mkvmerge output directory

Step 10.

Drag and Drop your Blu-ray discs onto the first grid and select the discs you would like to extract

Step 11.

On the Disc summary grid, select the summaries (episodes) you would like to extract

Step 12.

Double-click each summary item (episode) on the Disc summary grid to open up the Blu-ray Title Info Screen

Step 13.

On the Blu-ray Title Info Screen, enter in the episode number (you must tell BatchGuy what the correct episode numbers are)

Step 14.

Enter in the episode name (optional)

Step 15.

Choose the video, audio, subtitles, chapters (at least 1 of these must be chosen)

Step 16.

Enter the MKVToolNix Track Name, Language, Default Track Flag and Forced Track Flag on the right of the screen (BatchGuy will attempt to set the language automatically based upon the eac3to information. If you chose not to enable audio and subtitle language defaults, the English audio default track flag will be defaulted to "yes" and all other audio and subtitles will be defaulted to "no" and the forced track flag will be set to "no&quot

Step 17.

Next, if you need to add external subtitles, press the Add External Subtitle Button and choose the external subtitle language and spcify the location of the subtitle file and press save. Once you have done thisa, press the update button on the bottom right of the BluRay Title Info Screen.

Step 18.

On the Create eac3to Batch File Screen, save the (.batchGuyEac3toSettings) file by using the menu located at the upper left corner of the screen and then click the Create eac3to Batch File button and then click the Create mkvmerge Batch File menu items

Step 19.

Find the eac3to (.bat) file BatchGuy created and double-click it to start extracting the Blu-ray tracks

Step 20.

After the Blu-ray files have been extracted, find the extracted files (in this example a directory per playlist)

Step 21.

Find the mkvmerge (.bat) file BatchGuy created and double-click it to start remuxing the Blu-ray tracks

Step 22.

Once the mkvmerge (.bat) file has completed remuxing the Blu-ray files, navigate to the the directory that you chose to output the files and see the remuxed files

Special Thanks

Just wanted to take the time to send a special thanks to all my fellow HDBits members, remuxers and encoders for providing technical expertise when needed, feature requests, reporting bugs and providing constructive suggestions.

Also, the Github wiki version of this guide can be found here

Last edited by Katara 3 years, 10 months ago

Any update on this guide? Just checking in because it has been over a month.

Ok, this is awesome. I haven't tried it yet, but will. I have an interest in going from Blu-Ray disks to Remuxes.

FatChoi Wrote:

Ok, this is awesome. I haven't tried it yet, but will. I have an interest in going from Blu-Ray disks to Remuxes.

Let me know what you think!

mg58 Wrote:

FatChoi Wrote:

Ok, this is awesome. I haven't tried it yet, but will. I have an interest in going from Blu-Ray disks to Remuxes.

Let me know what you think!

I will. Probably set it up this weekend and run through it. I have been using (or trying to...) DVDFab to extract the episodes from Blu-Rays. But it is hit or miss at times. I get frustrated a lot and just end up sorting the m2ts by size and renaming and moving them to a single directory and trying to figure out if I have the right episode order and specials. It's pretty time consuming and annoying. So, if this works I will owe you one.

Any thought of porting this to Linux? I do almost everything on Linux now. I know it's kind of an unreasonable request.

A co-worker was talking to me about electron a few months ago and I looked into that but it would be too much work. BatchGuy was written in WinForms and according to members of the .Net Core Team, WinForms will probably never get ported over because of the heavy dependencies on Windows OS libraries.

Does eac3to and mkvmerge work in Linux?

Also, BatchGuy is not going to tell you what the episode order is. Everyone has their own way of figuring out the episode order but what I do is:

Let's say I want to remux Lost S01

1) I find the smallest version of the Season Pack on here or other sites that I can find. SD, Web-DL, Scene etc etc.
2) Use that Season Pack as the guide to let me know which episode is what

I have clocked this several times, it usually takes me about 10 mins to do that and get it entered into BatchGuy. And once you have entered all of that information, you can save it forever and re-load it if you have too. You don't have to have the Blu-ray files unless you need to re-extract.

Normally I sort by file name. Typically they will be in order of like 00051.mpls -> 00011.m2ts, 00052.mpls -> 00012.m2ts, etc....

Also, having used BatchGuy now and seen what it does I vote to move it to Approved Tutorials. It's a very slick tool and the tutorial was written very well. I followed the steps exactly and it worked like expected.

FatChoi Wrote:

Normally I sort by file name. Typically they will be in order of like 00051.mpls -> 00011.m2ts, 00052.mpls -> 00012.m2ts, etc....

Also, having used BatchGuy now and seen what it does I vote to move it to Approved Tutorials. It's a very slick tool and the tutorial was written very well. I followed the steps exactly and it worked like expected.

Thanks for the kind words FatChoi!

Honestly, I have seen too many times that trying to sort the Playlist or (.m2ts) files to determine the correct episode order hasn't worked out. BatchGuy sorts the Playlist in ascending order automatically (a feature request by a HDB member) but I always go through and look at every playlist in a video player and compare it to a SD or Scene Season Pack (whatever is smallest to save space on the Seedbox) I downloaded and this has resulted in never having to do a proper because the episodes were wrong.

mg58 Wrote:

Honestly, I have seen too many times that trying to sort the Playlist or (.m2ts) files to determine the correct episode order hasn't worked out. BatchGuy sorts the Playlist in ascending order automatically (a feature request by a HDB member) but I always go through and look at every playlist in a video player and compare it to a SD or Scene Season Pack (whatever is smallest to save space on the Seedbox) I downloaded and this has resulted in never having to do a proper because the episodes were wrong.

I would encode and download to watch the intro. Some shows are nice and have titles. Your method works too unless there are episodes with the same length.

FatChoi Wrote:

Your method works too unless there are episodes with the same length.

The episodes length wouldn't matter. I am actually watching each Blu-ray playlist in a video player and then literally watching each episode in the season pack I downloaded in a video player to ensure they are the same episode. It probably takes about 15 minutes to do that on a normal Blu-ray.

For me, actually watching the playlists is the only 100% way to guarantee that the episode order is correct.

mg58 Wrote:

The episodes length wouldn't matter. I am actually watching each Blu-ray playlist in a video player and then literally watching each episode in the season pack I downloaded in a video player to ensure they are the same episode. It probably takes about 15 minutes to do that on a normal Blu-ray.

For me, actually watching the playlists is the only 100% way to guarantee that the episode order is correct.

Oh..... yeah that doesn't work for me. I don't bring stuff down locally when I worked with Blu-Rays. Playing remotely (especially when no video player on the remote machine) is not something that works well. So, I go by length and remediate any issues by watching the first few minutes for a title.

drag and drop isn't working on my windows10. is there something I need to do? a workaround?

noir Wrote:

drag and drop isn't working on my windows10. is there something I need to do? a workaround?

What screen is drag/drop not working?

Make sure you have the latest version of the .Net Framework and also, take a look at the logs, which should be located in the Logs folder in the exe directory and see if it has any errors.

I myself run Win10, so Win10 is definitely not an issue.

Hey @mg58, I am loving BatchGuy and it is my go-to remuxing utility now. I do have a few feature requests. Only if you have time/interest in them:

• It would be nice if the eac3to Batch window would save the previously used directories and files so that those don't have to be re-entered each time. Or maybe a way to load those settings from a save file.
• Same with the Naming Convention settings.
• Would be nice to be able to remove added discs. No way I know of to remove them. Just have to close eac3to Batch window and start over.
• The eac3to Batch window overwrites the eac3to and mkvmerge file when you select them. It would be preferred to not overwrite those until save is selected from the menu.
• And last, a combined eac3to and mkvmerge batch file output would be nice so that it extracts and then muxes with a single batch file. This one is very low priority as I just created that batch file myself, but maybe it would be nice for others.

Again, thanks a ton mate for this utility. It's great.

@FatChoi, all good suggestions. I don't have as much time now but I will definitely look into making these changes once I get some free time. Most likely I will add a feature at a time and release.

Also, if you wouldn't mind, could you post this in the " HOWTO: Remuxing Blu-ray Discs with BatchGuy" @ HDBits? Makes it easier to track suggestions if it is all in one place.

mg58 Wrote:

Also, if you wouldn't mind, could you post this in the " HOWTO: Remuxing Blu-ray Discs with BatchGuy" @ HDBits? Makes it easier to track suggestions if it is all in one place.

Done, as requested. Much more feedback in that thread anyway.

noir Wrote:

drag and drop isn't working on my windows10. is there something I need to do? a workaround?

noir, I recenlty troubleshot this issue on my own machine albeit during development. Make sure you are not running the BatchGuy executable as an Administrator. If you do, this will mean that you will be running the application with a higher security level than Windows Explorer and features like drag/drop may not work.

link

Amazing tutorial very insightful many thanks mg58

nvm, I found links in the other thread. Apologies.

Last edited by rawr703 1 year, 9 months ago