DVD h.264 encoding discussion

I'm in the midst of ripping my DVDs to my HDD and then converting them to mp4 so I can save space. I have some questions for others who do the same thing.

1) Is mp4 a good format to encode? I tried some AVI encodes and the quality is complete crap at the same bitrate as mp4. I also tried MKV and this led to all sorts of artifacts in the picture.

2) What type of bitrate do you find is good for regular movies? I ripped all my Futurama episodes at an average bitrate of 1500kbps using a 2-pass encode. This worked great for animation, but for regular movies it looks like complete crap. I might try something like an 80% constant quality encode. I would like to keep a 2-hour movie to about 3gb.

I use Handbrake for the conversion and it does the job pretty well. It was freeware and does multi-core encoding, which is great.

EDIT: Just did an MKV encode at constant quality and it worked fine. I might use that for the rest of my movies

Just rip it at 65% on Handbrake, you won't notice any difference anything higher than that. Do deblock and deinterlace as well. Animated Movies, the Animation setting works fine.

Is mp4 a good format to encode? I tried some AVI encodes and the quality is complete crap at the same bitrate as mp4. I also tried MKV and this led to all sorts of artifacts in the picture.

Click to expand...

MP4, AVI and MKV are just containers, it depends entirely on what sort of video stream is inside them. Usually AVI contains Divx or xvid, which are lower quality than h.264/x264. Most MP4s are usually h.264/x264 nowadays, although it can contain an Mpeg4 baseline format which is along the same lines as xvid. MKV can contain just about anything.

That said, it's probably best to stick with MP4 as your container, since MKV isn't really well supported by many players. The advantage to MKV is that it can hold multiple streams, so you can keep two or more audio languages and multiple subtitle streams, and switch between them... but you don't need that if you're just encoding English DVD movies.

Average bitrate sounds like a good idea at first, but I've never seen it work well in practice. A true VBR would be the best, since it would give you a good balance of quality and file size, but since Handbrake seems to lack that option, constant quality is the second choice.

As for what settings to use, there's no single good answer, you pretty much just have to play around with settings until you find something satisfactory. Dicecca112's recommendation is a good starting point.

when using handbrake, at the section where you can set the h.264 settings with your own code/settings, here is the code I use:

ref=3:mixed-refs=1:bframes=3:b-pyramid=1:b-rdo=1:bime=1:weightb=1:subme=6:trellis=1:analyse=all:8x8dct=1:vbv-maxrate=25000