What setting should I use for compressing mkv rips of DVDs in handbrake

Galaxy2007 · April 20, 2023

I've started building my HTPC and found MakeMKV, but the rips are quite large and take up a lot of space and I only have 2 SATA ports and no nvme on my motherboard (one for an optical drive one for a 1tb ssd) so I need to save space, but don't want to lose too much video or audio quality.

I don't actually own any blu ray disks yet, but id also like to know the best setting for those for when I do get some. My TV is only 720p but I do have a multi speaker soundbar so good audio quality matters more than the video quality. PC has an i7-3770, 8GB RAM and Intel HD Graphics 4000.

BobVonBob · April 20, 2023

The "Fast 720p30" or "HQ 720p30 Surround" presets will be fine for your use case. H.265/VP9/AV1 have a little bit of a benefit, but your CPU doesn't have hardware decoding support for them and you aren't going to be playing back at a very high quality anyway. I'm sure the 3770 can handle 720p software decoding of those formats, but you won't get much benefit for a relatively large amount of extra power, which might cause distracting fan noise depending on your cooler. If you anticipate moving to a higher resolution screen some time soon you could use one of the higher resolution versions of those presets so you don't need to re-encode them twice.

Unless you take a pickaxe to the audio settings the presets all default to perfectly reasonable values, so no worries about bad audio.

dalekphalm · April 25, 2023

On 4/19/2023 at 10:16 PM, random person from ohio said:

I've started building my HTPC and found MakeMKV, but the rips are quite large and take up a lot of space and I only have 2 SATA ports and no nvme on my motherboard (one for an optical drive one for a 1tb ssd) so I need to save space, but don't want to lose too much video or audio quality.

Are you ripping DVD's only? Or are you ripping higher quality sources like Blu-Rays? This will affect the settings used.

My recommendation would be, for DVD content, to keep the Resolution matched the same as the source (You don't want to upscale DVD content to 720p since that just wastes data and won't improve the quality - you also don't want to scale the image down anymore since it's already LQ).

For video quality, use the "Constant Quality" function - I recommend RF = 20, but you can probably get away with RF = 22 or even higher (0 = highest quality, 50 = lowest quality). Constant Quality is like an advanced version of Variable Bitrate, where it will try to maintain a consistent quality level for every frame regardless of how complex the frame is (therefore, simple frames, like a frame with one solid colour, require far less bitrate than a complex frame with fine detail, fire, motion, etc).

For audio, I would suggest going into the audio settings, and passing through all the 5.1 surround sound tracks you want (You only need to keep the ones you want, so if you didn't need the additional languages or the commentary track, you could exclude those).

I would output to MKV as it's a more versatile container, but MP4 is also acceptable. For DVD content, use H.264 (I doubt you'd get much, if any benefit from H.265).

On 4/19/2023 at 10:16 PM, random person from ohio said:

I don't actually own any blu ray disks yet, but id also like to know the best setting for those for when I do get some. My TV is only 720p but I do have a multi speaker soundbar so good audio quality matters more than the video quality. PC has an i7-3770, 8GB RAM and Intel HD Graphics 4000.

For when you are doing Blu-Ray rips, the advice above pretty much remains the same, except the Constant Quality number may want to be increased (RF = 20 or RF = 18 are common settings, RF = 18 is nearly identical to the raw Blu-Ray footage). You may also want to consider switching from H.264 to H.265 for Blu-Rays (and especially 4K Blu-Rays).

If you need to save more file space, whether DVD or Blu-Ray, all you need to do is re-export with a slightly larger RF number (Eg: if you ripped at RF = 20, and it's still too large, re-export at RF = 22 and compare).