HandBrake

Hi,

I am looking for some advice regarding converting blu-rays to 720 mkvs.

I have been encoding my bluray collection for the last few months using the Normal preset, 1280 width, with a bitrate of 5000.

Since 0.9.4 has been released many people seem to be switching to constant quality. However, a number of people have been saying that the quality is not as good as when using target bitrate.

Does anybody have any advice on what settings they use to produce their mkvs?

I suppose space isn't really too much of an issue and i have been producing files of about 5-6gb. But I suppose if its not necessary for this bitrate anymore it would be worth switching to CC.

I currently store them on my PC and watch them through media centre. But at some point I would like to re encode for an apple tv.

Any help would be most appreciated. And I apologise if this has been discussed before.

Since 0.9.4 has been released many people seem to be switching to constant quality. However, a number of people have been saying that the quality is not as good as when using target bitrate.

Source?

I've been encoding Bluray to 720p MP4 for AppleTV at RF20 and couldn't be happier with the results.

High Profile preset, drop the AC3 track if you don't want surround sound (Normal preset doesn't include AC3), twiddle the RF to get the quality/size you want. I'd start out with an RF of 22.

No reason to drop the width to 1280 unless you're limited by your playback device (like Apple TV) or display (720p HDTV instead of 1080).

I do prefer CBR (or ABR) with double pass. File size is also predictable although encoding times are longer (a lot). I would start from 3 MBps.

luxuryliner wrote:I do prefer CBR (or ABR) with double pass.

I think you mean 2-pass VBR. ABR refers to single-pass, which is a low-quality method.

creamyhorror wrote:

luxuryliner wrote:I do prefer CBR (or ABR) with double pass.

I think you mean 2-pass VBR. ABR refers to single-pass, which is a low-quality method.

CBR (constant) is the lower quality 1 pass method.
ABR (average) is the higher quality 2 pass method.
Strictly speaking VBR (variable) is the constant quality method, but it's sometimes used more loosely to cover ABR encoding.

mduell wrote:[CBR (constant) is the lower quality 1 pass method.

In x264, even single-pass encodes are ABR, not CBR. AFAIK the only way to get CBR with x264 is to use some combination of ABR and vbv.

Right, it's as Rodeo said. x264's 2-pass and CRF methods use the same bitrate distribution algorithm, and they're not generally called "ABR". 1-pass is called ABR, because it certainly doesn't maintain a constant bitrate.