I am a newbie PLEX user and had a question about best practices for ripping BluRay and DVD disks. I use MakeMKV for ripping BluRay disks and VideoProc Converter for my DVD disks. There are several possible formats but it seems MKV and mp4 are the preferred choices. I have four questions.
What is the preferred format (MKV, mp4, other)?
I have three options for audio track (truehd or ac3 for mkv and aac for mp4). What is the preferred choice?
I like to have the option choose whether or not to enable subtitles. Is it best to embed these in the video format or save the subtitles as separate files (SRT or ASS)?
I notice with VideoProc Converter the english subtitles have two choices yet they have the same descriptor (eng, HDMV Presentation Graphic Stream subtitles). Does it make any difference which one I choose?
There’s no “yes” or “no”, “right” or “wrong” answers to your questions. Those will very much depend on what you want to achieve.
If you have a sufficiently powerful server and aim for the best possible quality, you’ll go with a “raw” rip, e.g. using MakeMKV. This will keep the (selected) media streams as-is → best possible quality from your source, potentially not super compatible.
If your setup is constrained with limited storage or CPU performance, your target might be to aim for optimized versions that use less space and offer good compatibility → decreased quality at reduced file sizes.
To make things a bit more complicated… there’s some mages in this community who will fine-tune and optimize the transcoding parameters so you’ll barely notice any quality reductions (if at all). Though… that requires quite a learning curve.
As for your specific questions:
shouldn’t matter all that much – the limiting factor will be the type/format of tracks inside those containers. If a platform isn’t playing nice with MKV, Plex can relatively easily remux them on-the-fly (putting the tracks into a new “envelope”, without touching the content). General rule of thumb:
few players might have trouble with MKV, preferring mp4 (little impact → see above
MKV offers a wider support for what formats it can contain (mp4 containers e.g. don’t support many higher-quality audio codecs or image-based subtitles)
If you have an audio system that supports True HD audio and you have a sufficiently powerful server… keep that – if you only stream to your TV speakers or a mid-level audio system, AC3 will probably be sufficient. As a side note: mp4 containers will also support AC3 audio tracks.
You can have “soft subtitles” both ways… if you have your subtitle as SRT you can embed them in your movie file or store them alongside. Just avoid burning them into the video (some video converters offer/prefer such an option).
Plex’ support for ASS subtitles is rather limited.
I’m not familiar with this particular software, so I’m not sure what they mean. I suppose this is about keeping the image-based subtitles from your disc rip (e.g. VOBSUB or PGS) vs. converting them to a text-based subtitle format (e.g. SRT)
Personally I like my image-based subtitles better as they keep the original layout/font – however this is only working for me because I’m using clients which are capable to display those image-based subtitles. Some smart tv clients can only deal with text-based subtitles and require the Plex Media Server to burn image-based subtitles into the video (that’s basically an on-the-fly re-encode of your file… which can be too much for some CPUs).
TL;DR: make sure you’re clear about your use cases, then decide about the format to meet your needs.
DVD and BluRay will always give you only image-based subtitles.
Not many Plex clients are compatible with these. Additionally, only text-based subtitles allow you to customize their appearance.
For optimum compatibility, either convert them to text-based (SRT) or “obtain” them from somewhere else.
See Introduction: convert image-based subtitles to SRT with Subtitle Edit
