I am sure this question has been asked many, many times but I cannot seem to find the right answer. I have been converting my DVD collection and recently purchased a BR drive - i did not realize that the BR rips are HUGE files. I know that storage is pretty cheap but 150 BR at 30gb per is a lot of TB. What is a good compromise between size and quality? I have seen posts about doing an Make MVK rip and then converting with Handbrake but is this the best option?
When I rip BR discs, a 2hr film is 50GB in H.264. I am one to keep the quality high (50+ Mbps) so the file is literally ‘perfect’ on a large television. The type of content is key. Those 50+ Mbps films also have a great deal of CGI. Keeping the bitrate high is important to keep nice crisp edges as the film is intended. Let the size fall where it must to keep the quality.
HandBrake is probably the best if you really want to crunch it to H.264 and keep the sizes as low as possible (Constant Quality setting). Because I have the NAS (32TB), I leave the rip as-is. Remember, once you throw away bits, they’re gone. Again, the purist in me speaking out. You’ll find I’m one of the smaller-NAS users here. Some of the Ninjas have 75+ TB NAS setups.
I’m in the other camp. I crunch my media down and convert (HandBrake) to a format that should direct play on my clients. I do keep some of the original rips for certain movies. Most of the time I can’t see the difference. I believe I can see a slight difference on “The Martian”. Straight rip was around 30GB and the converted version is just over 7GB. My vision isn’t what it used to be and my biggest TV is 48".
And thus the Goldilocks story comes to an end!
I’m right in the middle!
I use my NAS, and keep my big block buster movies at full size while I crunch down DVD’s and older movies I want to keep around but don’t need every pixel to make me happy. Also I rarely reconvert HD-Audio doing a simple pass through.
For TV shows, comedies etc I’ll usually rip/convert or just buy them on itunes to build my digital library there and then pull the itunes file to keep on my NAS. Skips the handbrake process when sales come around.
@astrofisher said:
I’m in the other camp. I crunch my media down and convert (HandBrake) to a format that should direct play on my clients. I do keep some of the original rips for certain movies. Most of the time I can’t see the difference. I believe I can see a slight difference on “The Martian”. Straight rip was around 30GB and the converted version is just over 7GB. My vision isn’t what it used to be and my biggest TV is 48".
I keep my files large because I have the 47 and the 65. The 65" is a 4K set. It will upsample to 4K, which it does well, if there is enough data. I could keep 4K rips but that seems like overkill, plus I will need another NAS if I do that 
(Hmmmmm… Christmas? ) I think the high bitrate, 1080p (2k) is a fair middle ground.
If i want to, I can spin the MKV rip to MP4 and set the movflags to faststart (ffmpeg) for web streaming if I wish.
I have been through so many different methods of how to rip files, and I have settled on, full rips using makemkv for big blockbuster movies (marvel universe, the Martian, etc)that have a lot of special effects and for the average movie such as comedies, the wife’s chick flicks or some kids films I handbrake down to 5mbps, some blu-rays just don’t need to be extremely high nitrates, and using handbrake for the movies you are not as bothered about is I find the best solution.
handbrake based on quality not bitrate is what i do. Sure, that makes michael bay movies 10x the size of a rom-com, but that’s as it should be, in my book.
I use DVDFab and rip to MKV H264 or H265 to around the 8-10GB mark depending on the length of the movie. Always seem to come out top quality.
What would be best between MKV and MP4 for my “secondary” copy, which i intend to use from my mobile devices at home and maybe from external? It seems MP4 is optimizable for web but does it has any compromises when used on a local network? My understanding is that it is just a container and should not have any, does it?
@jgauthier72 said:
It seems MP4 is optimizable for web but does it has any compromises when used on a local network?
The MP4 container has a full index of sample timings and file locations. The Optimized for web only means that this index is at the beginning rather than the end. It is friendlier on a player that doesn’t use range requests on the server so it can linearly load the file and play as it downloads. It has no impact on quality or even size for that matter.
@gbooker02 said:
@jgauthier72 said:
It seems MP4 is optimizable for web but does it has any compromises when used on a local network?The MP4 container has a full index of sample timings and file locations. The Optimized for web only means that this index is at the beginning rather than the end. It is friendlier on a player that doesn’t use range requests on the server so it can linearly load the file and play as it downloads. It has no impact on quality or even size for that matter.
@gbooker02 is correct. "optimizing for web’ relocated the MOOV atom (object) to the beginning of the file and only effects the MP4 “container” not the streams in it.
The ffmpeg option -movflags faststart does this as its second pass action.
