Best settings for bluray rips?

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YaBoyShredderson
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Joined: Fri May 29, 2020 5:17 pm

Best settings for bluray rips?

Post by YaBoyShredderson »

First things first, im quite sensitive to video quality and artifacts and what not. Not so much sound, however, i dont have a sound bar or speaker system, i just use my tv speakers. I want to keep soumd quality relatively high in case i do buy a soundbar or something in the future.

I rip all my blurays to an 8tb hdd and its running out of space. I would like some advice, and explanations about the best way to go about compressing my movies and series. I know some people would just say to buy another hdd as storage is cheap and what not, but id rather keep everything in one place.

I would be watching on a 55inch tv (samsung q70r) from about 8-10 feet away to give you an idea of the quality retention i would need. With the 1080p blurays using x264, i should be able to get very good compression using x265 right? What are the best settings to use then? Theoretically i would be looking at about half the size, given h265 is said to be about twice as efficient as h264, so what preset and crf value should i be looking at? Ive heard so many different opinions, people saying 14 is practocally lossless all the way up to 18 being unnoticable.

What about 4k hdr content? Is handbrake suitable of handling this kind of video peoperly? Do i just use the same settings but with 10 bit instead of 8 bit? I heard that handbrake doesnt work well with this kind of content, as its 8 bit internally or something like that. Im not too familiar with video encoding so i may be getting a bit rambly.

Also should i use different settings depending on whether its a movie or a series? With a movie being between 1.5 to 2.5 hours, i can deal with a slower encode a bit more than a series, with some having many 10s or even more than 100 hours to encode.

Thanks in advance.
rollin_eng
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Re: Best settings for bluray rips?

Post by rollin_eng »

Start with a preset, probably HQ or Super HQ.
mduell
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Re: Best settings for bluray rips?

Post by mduell »

At 1080p and high quality, there's no reason to use x265, just use x264 with reasonable settings.

x265 is better than x264 in some cases, but high quality 1080p isn't one of them.
YaBoyShredderson
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Re: Best settings for bluray rips?

Post by YaBoyShredderson »

What about audio? I usually encode to aac 5.1 768kbs. I do this as i may get a higher quality sound system later on and want to keep audio high quality.

Samsung tvs do not support dolby audio like dts hd master or truehd atmos or something, so i convert them to aac.

How do i decide what audio to convert, dts hd ma 5.1 or 7.1 or truehd or truehd atmos etc. If im converting to 5.1, should i use a 5.1 source, or would a 7.1 source be better as there is more information in the original audio?

Last one, is 768kbs overkill? Should i tone it down to 512 or something?
YaBoyShredderson
Posts: 48
Joined: Fri May 29, 2020 5:17 pm

Re: Best settings for bluray rips?

Post by YaBoyShredderson »

Last last one. Is aac the ideal codec to use? Or would something else be better.
Woodstock
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Re: Best settings for bluray rips?

Post by Woodstock »

Audio "best" depends on what you have to play it back with. AAC is considered "more universal", but my equipment handles AC3 better. And, if you're encoding on anything but a Mac, the AAC quality isn't going to be the best, due to licensing issues.

My tendency is AC3, AAC, and pass through whatever is the highest quality, for some day when I have equipment to play it.
YaBoyShredderson
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Re: Best settings for bluray rips?

Post by YaBoyShredderson »

Ok i have come to a conclusion, and saved it as a custom preset, i did a fair bit of testing to find this. But my goal was to get the best possible quality at about half the file size.

I basically just chose several shows/movies, split them up into 100mb chunks with mkv tool nix and chose them at random and then encoded them. I averaged the amount of compression, so a know 50mb file is 50% the size and what not. I came to an average compression of 45%, but some files compressed very well it seemed, down ti like 11% but some actually got a bit bigger? I didnt test a whole movie or episode so maybe its just that 1 minute clip that gets bigger and the whole file will get smaller overall. I know some stuff will compress differently to others but i didnt know there would be such wild swings in size. How do i deal with this? Just turn down the quality on the rf scale?
rollin_eng
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Re: Best settings for bluray rips?

Post by rollin_eng »

Can you post your log?
mduell
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Re: Best settings for bluray rips?

Post by mduell »

Pick a reasonable RF (i.e. low 20s) that roughly meets your size preference over a variety of content and move on.
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JohnAStebbins
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Re: Best settings for bluray rips?

Post by JohnAStebbins »

Does your playback environment support h.265 10bit? If so, do some tests with x265 10bit encoding. It will generally reduce blockiness that often shows up in darker scenes with 8bit encoding.

For the samples that encoded on the larger side, try those samples again with the NLMeans denoise filter. Even subtle film noise can bloat output file size quite a lot.

Be aware of how much space your audio tracks are taking. Modern audio codecs like TrueHD and DTS-HD are very high bitrate. So if you are using audio passthrough, they can be a significant contributor to your file size. E.g. in most of my HD encodes, the audio track was larger than the video track. In one I just inspected, video 1.5GB, audio 4.1GB.
YaBoyShredderson
Posts: 48
Joined: Fri May 29, 2020 5:17 pm

Re: Best settings for bluray rips?

Post by YaBoyShredderson »

JohnAStebbins wrote: Mon Jun 01, 2020 5:09 pm Does your playback environment support h.265 10bit? If so, do some tests with x265 10bit encoding. It will generally reduce blockiness that often shows up in darker scenes with 8bit encoding.

For the samples that encoded on the larger side, try those samples again with the NLMeans denoise filter. Even subtle film noise can bloat output file size quite a lot.

Be aware of how much space your audio tracks are taking. Modern audio codecs like TrueHD and DTS-HD are very high bitrate. So if you are using audio passthrough, they can be a significant contributor to your file size. E.g. in most of my HD encodes, the audio track was larger than the video track. In one I just inspected, video 1.5GB, audio 4.1GB.
With the audio, i encode the best one with ac3 5.1 at 512kbs. The noise is actually something i was thinking about, i trued back to the future part 1 with my settings, and with a 1 minute clip, it actually got larger, but with nlmeans set to medium is helped quite a bit. I dont like the softening though, so i would probably use a weaker setting for an actual encode. What would be the best options? I would like something i can leave on all the time preferably, that will only work as and when needed, reducing file size without destroying fine detail, and only modified on particularly noisy sources. I read an explanation about the denoising filter (the older one) that said temporal settings like 0:0:3:3 is fine for this.
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