So on my first NAS I was running outta room , so I was doing a lower quality bluray rip. Now that I’ve upgraded I have extra room and started re-ripping at a Higher quality. 6.4 gig vs 16 gig. Do you think this really affects the quality of the rip. Of the few I a
Have redone i really haven’t noticed a big increase in quality
Depends on your source material and what encoder you use to create the rip.
If space is not an issue… simply get the files as-is from your discs (e.g. using MakeMKV). No need to transcode your content unless space is an issue.
It’s going to be a different discussion for DVD based content… those are usually encoded in MPEG2 which is a lousy codec. Re-Encoding them in h264 will give you significantly smaller files with (even for high-quality encodes).
I’m using DVDFab. And rip to mp4. 2.64
TL;DR: quality isn’t improving if you do a lossy re-encode of an already lossy encoded video
Sorry I’m dumb, I don’t know what the means , I’m lucky I got it to work thus far …
so for the RE encode, if I believe what your saying. I will Re-rip the disk at a higher quality per DVD fab, example Joe Dirt was 6.3 Gig at medium quality , but when I did high quality setting it was 13.2 Gigs and if I think what your saying is . the quality setting doesn’t matter in an MP4 configuration. the quality remains the same . ?
unfortunately there is no standard answer, everyone has their own eyes and tolerances for quality vs size.
The best quality you can is a remux with no re-compression (ie makemkv), at the expense of larger files (the size of the source disk).
Once you compress further, it is all down to your eyes and the trade off of size vs quality vs time to encode.
There are probably millions of guides on how to use handbrake and other tools to re-compress your rips, but only you can make the final decision on what looks best to you and still saves you disk space.
My suggestion to you is to start of with an unmodified remux/rip of the disk.
Use your compression program to convert a 5 or 10 minutes sample to the smallest/lowest quality, and then start moving up the quality/size until you find the setting that looks best while still providing acceptable to you file sizes.
Or don’t re-compress at all, and just understand that you will have to keep increasing storage as your collection grows.
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I have looked in MKV vs MP4 and the way I read to understand plex has a harder time transcoding MKV than it does MP4.
That’s not correct.
People just tend to throw more variants/flavors of different codecs into MKV – that mixed bag of content COULD result in trouble for some. This has nothing to do with the “container” format (e.g. mkv, mp4…).
The point we were trying to make is:
If space is not an issue, you can use the content of your disc “as-is”. The reason most users do this e.g. using MakeMKV and the mkv container is that it’s more flexible to deal with the higher-quality content while mp4 has some parts of its specification restricting it (e.g. mp4 does not allow to store DTS audio… nor many other audio or subtitle formats you will find on a Blu-Ray).
MKV/MP4 are containers which contain the compressed data. Certain types of compressed data (codecs) are allowed in each of the respective containers. MKV generally allows just about everything and MP4 is much more restrictive (MKV can contain everything that MP4 can and more). Plex can transcode from an MKV or MP4 equally well (it really doesn’t care).
Ripping from a DVD using MakeMKV (closest to lossless you can get) will yield you an MKV file with H.262 (MPEG2Video) video, AC3 audio (rarely it’s PCM instead), and VOBSUB subtitles. Of those only the audio is legal to have in an MP4 file.
Ripping a BD will typically yield you an MKV with H.264 Video, TrueHD or DTS-HD audio, and PGS subtitles and only the video is legal in an MP4.
Transcoding these to an MP4 will give you a quality loss though in some circumstances the quality loss is negligible. Deciding whether to transcode or not is a decision that you have to make based on the storage requirements vs how much space you want to spend and whether clients can direct play the MKV from a DVD/BD.
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