Lossless Blu-ray films on Plex?

[MatthewBowker]

Hello,

 

I am quite new to Plex, only earlier this week I dove into using it myself, and so far I am loving it. I have been a fan of Spotify for having such a vast range of music that is so easily accessible, and now being able to steam my music to my speakers or TV using Google's Chromecast products has just got me using the service more and more, but I have always been a little dissappointed that no matter what you can't get Lossless qualitfy on Spotify. So now I have found what Plex can do for me, taking my fairly massive stash of CD's and turning them into FLAC files on my computer which I can access from anyway means that I can now live in a world of quality and convenience.

 

The only thing now for me is how can I replicate this satisfaction with my favourite Blu-ray films? I have gone online and found that a handy program called Handbreak can rip my movies off of DVD's and Blu-ray's just like my CD collection, but I don't really know what I need to do to insure that I get as close to Lossless as I can? Also something else is even after ripping Blu-ray's to their Lossless files on my desktop, can I even steam that good a quality using Plex to other devices in my house or will the quality be compressed anyway? So what I would really like to know is what is the highest quality I can steam video at on Plex? And then what is the next quality level up from that which I can rip my Blu-ray films onto my desktop at so that I don't take up too much space but also get the best quality streaming I can out of Plex?

 

Another thought of mine is I use Windows and Android but others who I have shared my Plex library with are on iOS and Mac OS X so its desirable that the codecs for these files can be read on those platforms as well unless the compression is only a little bit worse for iOS and Mac OS X because I can live with that.

 

I really hope that makes sense. It's late where I am and I am tired.

 

Thanks in advance, Matt.

[PlayStation 2]

If you're doing 1080p, you're pushing at least 15Mbps video and audio passthrough

[dalekphalm]

@MatthewBowker the easiest thing to do is use a handy feature in Handbrake called "Constant Quality" (Shown as the setting "RF"). It's similar to the idea behind "variable bit-rate", except that rather than choose a target file size, you're choosing a target quality level.

 

Basically, any given scene in a movie doesn't require the same bit-rate to achieve the same level of quality. Eg: A scene with a person looking at a wall painted white will require a lot less bit-rate compared to a scene of a space ship firing a particle beam and destroying another ship.

 

See this for details on RF settings:

https://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/ConstantQuality

 

Most guides I've seen recommend using a "RF" setting of 18 for near lossless quality of Blu-Ray videos.

 

I recommend you start with one Blu-Ray, and try a few different RF settings until you find the one that is up to your standards. Most of my Blu-Ray's using RF 18 come in around 8-12GB in size, with a few going as large as 20GB, and some going as low as 6GB. The vast majority of them are around 10GB though.

 

If you want smaller size, use RF 19 or RF 20. The scale works as follows: The closer you get to RF 1, the higher the quality. However, there's not much point in setting it any lower than RF 17 or even 16. The file size will just start to balloon like mad, and can even end up larger than the original Blu-Ray unripped.

 

This guide might be a good place to start for the whole process:

http://lifehacker.com/5559007/the-hassle-free-guide-to-ripping-your-blu-ray-collection

 

Point of note: If you want to achieve maximum quality, and don't care about shrinking the file size, simply rip the Blu-Ray using MakeMKV, which is an uncompressed exact copy of the original movie, ripped into MKV format, with all the chapters and audio/subtitles preserved (You can choose which audio and subtitle tracks you rip):

http://www.makemkv.com/download/