If you've been using MakeMKV to rip Blu-ray movies to your hard drive, you may have noticed that the resulting MKV movies can be very, very large. If you want to reduce the size of those files without manually stepping through a lengthy and rather complex demuxing, transcoding, and remuxing process—or even looking those words up—downloading RipBot264 is the order of the day.

RipBot264 doesn't install directly to your hard drive. It unzips to a folder and you run it from there. Being portable is nice, but you'll need to create your own shortcuts to the program where you need them.

Once it's launched, Ripbot264 is simple to use. Open the MKV or most other video file types, tell the program to what format you'd like to transcode the video and audio, and let it have at it. Well, it's that simple after everything the program requires has been installed. You must already have free programs Java, AVisynth, ffdshow, the haali media splitter and Microsoft .Net Framework 2.0 or better installed. RipBot264 is simply a front-end to those programs. That's in addition the hoard of small tools that you'll find in the program's installation folder.

Your results with these free tools may vary. I had some issues with missing subtitles, out-of-sync audio and the like, but that's not RipBot264's fault. Once you're up to speed, you should get the results you want though it may not be as easy as with a commercial transcoder that supports MKV such as Cyberlink's $100 PowerDirector.

Note: The "Try it for free" button on the Product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.