Sub Titles cause issues when they’re image based subs - like PGS or VOB/DVD. UTF-8 text subs rarely cause issues because they can Direct Play on just about everything.
I curate ALL the material in my Plexiverse so it ALL Direct Plays. I am older so I don’t waste a lot bandwidth on quality I can’t see.
You just need to test a few files and make an informed decision about what you want to do. DVDs really won’t matter much. You’ll be able to draw them down pretty far before you ever start seeing ill effects.
Try this with any BluRay:
The file that loaded above needed a bit of cropping. Handbrake automatically did the cropping and this time it was perfect. Sometimes it’s not perfect. It just needs to be checked before you hit the Go Button and corrected if necessary. HB will occasionally get confused if the material is dark enough to trigger it’s auto-crop.
These settings are what I use. My eyeballs stop seeing any improvement above about 3250kbps - so I give it 3750kbps and call it a day. The first thing you need to do is be honest with yourself. The next thing is to weigh the pain and suffering of throwing files with HUGE bit rates around on your network or internet as opposed to a smaller file, perhaps a little lower in quality - if you can even see a difference at all.
I use Average Bitrate. I enjoy knowing about how big my files are going to be. I don’t enjoy wildly erratic file sizes I can’t see any difference in. I use 2 Pass with Turbo because with Average Bitrate I want HB to have a pass to think about where it wants to put all the dots - and put them there on the next pass.
The bottom line is you encode for your eyeballs and displays. If you’re not happy, give it more bit rate until you are. Easy as that.
Audio that needs to be transcoded may cause the entire stream to transcode. Pick an audio format ALL your clients can deal with - at least for this test.
Do NOT use Handbrake to encode subs into it’s file. It will create ASS subs - that have to transcode on everything I own. I mux any subs into the file AFTER HB has done it’s thing. ALL my subs are UTF-8 Text subs. Forced subs are Burned in with HB during it’s encode. HB can’t mess that up.
Run a few files through, put them aboard an Other Videos Library and play 'em back on everything you own. Fiddle around until you get happy.
