The only way to change the video format from VC-1 to h264 is via a full blown recode. I do not think MKV Tools will perform any voodoo magic either. A full blown recode is a full blown recode no matter who does it.
I do it myself and that same single thread issue presents itself during recodes making it quite painful - and lengthy - a process. You will have to recode the video stream, but you can maintain enough of the quality that your eyeballs won’t be able to see the difference. At least mine don’t.
You can add jobs to a queue with Handbrake - no problem - but the problem is going to be that 2 hour encode. 2 hours (and that’s on a beast of a machine) x 100 = 200 hours. Let’s break this down into manageable increments, like maybe one at a time until you find out how long it takes and how much of the day you’re willing to dedicate 100% of your box to this task.
Encoding… well that’s pretty straight forward. Let’s look at this Darkman 2 job I just recoded down from some ungodly large file that looked like crap to a more reasonable file size that looks like the exact same crap, but it’s not taking up 20GB of my hard drive space:
You would, of course, select MKV as your output file and do enable Web Optimized.
What you want is to use the High Profile preset to start, then drag your magnum file into Handbrake. Under the Picture Tab select ‘None’ for Anamorphic (assuming we’re working on a Blu Ray at 1080p) and ensure 1920x1080 is indeed the resolution. Check Keep Aspect Ratio - of course. Now if this is a wide screen item perform any cropping that’s necessary (by ticking the Custom tickbox) to remove black bars top and bottom (check the preview by hitting the button - lower left, see note) - no need to encode those bars in (this dam thing going to take long enough anyway). If you have to crop any off the sides make sure to bump it back up to 1920 (no matter what the height is) to maintain it’s full resolution.
No Preview Button in the Lower Left? Enable the ‘experimental’ Static Preview in the options.
Now on to the filters tab. Pray these items aren’t interlaced. If you think busting a VC-1 codec is a long process just wait until you have to enable decombing. The word ‘Glacial’ takes on a new meaning: Blinding Speed. Anyway, it’s highly unlikely a BR rip is going to be interlaced, but you never know these days.
Now we’re in our Video Tab shown above. Framerate - Same as Source (always) with a Variable Framerate. Locking down a framerate when you don’t know if the source uses different framerates is a bad idea. If you’ve never seen a poorly ripped Star Trek episode with 24fps for live action and 30fps for CGI shots with a locked down framerate you just haven’t lived. Let’s try not to live like that.
Use MediaInfo to inspect the original Bit Rate and then tick that box in front of Avg Bitrate and, you guessed it, match the original bit rate. Here’s where my eyeballs apparently differ a great deal from other eyeballs. I can whack an original bit rate from 35000Kbps down to 3900Kbps and my eyeballs can’t see the difference. My eyeballs aren’t in your head however and mine suffer from high mileage so your mileage may vary - and probably will.
Note: If you can drift that bit rate down a bit (or a lot) and maintain an acceptable quality (for your eyeballs) by all means do so. Any downward shift in that bit rate will produce an upward shift in the time it takes to do this - and that can’t be anything but good.
I ALWAYS ‘Use Advanced Tab instead’ by ticking it’s box and here are my exact settings:
This is already Gone With The Wind - so I’ll not try to explain all these settings, but trust me - they work fine.
We went right by the Audio Tab - 'cause ‘Advanced Tab’ was right there so… Audio Tab. Pretty straight forward. Click the left most tab where you’ll see a partial description of what’s in the drop down and find out what’s in the drop down. If you have 3 audio tracks add 2 tracks by clicking the Add Track button twice, then adjust those new tracks you added to contain track 1, 2, or 3 and adjust the codec to either passthru what’s there or encode a suitable replacement. Careful inspection of each available drop down should make it fairly self explanatory.
Same deal with subs - I guess - I’ve never actually done it. I rarely need subs.
Run some ‘Previews’ by clicking the button along the top (way different from the lower left Preview) - I use 240 second previews to get a good look and explore the different audio tracks and you could check your subtitle tracks as well. Using a 240 second ‘Preview’ will also let you ‘Preview’ how long this is going to take. If a 4 minute ‘Preview’ takes 8 minutes… well, you can do the math.
Let us know what happened.
