HandBrake

Most guides are wrong, many catastrophically so.

The output of that encode has surround audio.

Just copypasta without reading.

As this question relates to specific encodes you did in the past, it is not in any way a general question.

With the requisite logs we could tell you if in fact you do have surround sound or not.

Yes, although I'd leave autocrop on since DVDs have a lot of black bars that will bloat the filesize and are better off removed.

The Apple 4K preset should work with Plex, in addition to Apple devices.

Audio tracks (number and type/bitrate) will also impact size. As can filtering. Thus the logs requirement to avoid 20 (or is it 22?) questions.

HandBrake version (e.g., 1.0.0): 1.2.0 Operating system and version (e.g., Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, macOS 10.13 High Sierra, Windows 10 Creators Update): Windows 10 1803 NVidia GTX 980 Driver 397.93 HandBrake Activity Log ***required*** (see How-to get an activity log) [13:24:45] hb_init: starting libhb t...

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Description of problem or question: Hey guys, I am fairly new to Handbrake and compressing video files, only learned the "basics" of how it works and some "best settings" on youtube videos. File size get compressed, audio is fine but I still end up with blocking in dark scenes when compressing. I k...

Severely unlikely given the rapid implosion of the 3D TV market.

Set up the preset, including the audio/subtitle defaults you want, save it, then open the folder and encode them all.

Ultrafast is so inefficient you're probably better with x264 on more reasonable settings.

Stills don't tell you much of anything about how video looks.

Mixing veryfast and nlmeans is a... very strange choice.

And pick a tune appropriate for your content/preferences.

Also you say CFR (constant framerate) but you appear to mean CRF (constant rate factor).

HB is an 8 bit video pipeline, so you can't really do 10 bit HDR.

If you're at all concerned about quality for size you probably don't want veryfast.

Then you're going to end up with much larger files to preserve quality.

Or do the transcode on the fly.

How long is a piece of string?

With a high resolution source, filtering, a slow encoder, and a low power CPU, encoding is going to be quite slow.

The hardware encoders like NVENC trade off quality/size for speed, just speed. They're intended for realtime encoding (like streaming) with throwaway results. If you care at all about size efficiency, they're not for you. You may be able to use NVENC for realtime transcoding in Plex, and just stream...

You can't be "future proof" if you're using MP4 format, simply because it cannot contain all codecs used for audio or even subtitles. Even if you move on to better hardware, Plex will be limited by the source. Even MKV is limited with some of the latest gimmicks - although MKV can "grow" as a conta...

Rip with a DVD ripper like MakeMKV, then use HB if you need further processing.

Hardware encoders are for speed, largely targeting near-realtime applications. They're not efficient, so 2pass isn't a consideration.

The "best/highest quality" would be just to rip the disks with MakeMKV (keeping the original video and audio bitstreams), and not using HB at all. The files will be quite large. The HQ or Super HQ presets (480p for DVD, 1080p for BR), with the container changed to MKV, provides a perhaps more reason...