what is the best video compression for movies

[compwizpro]

Hi all. I have recently decided to rip my entire dvd collection to my file server for my htpc and other computers in the house. Originally before I decided to do all of my movies, I was doing a few using Handbrake. When I did this, I was able to get dvds between 1 and 2GB with exceptional video quality. However, when I played these files using XBMC, some of them gave my sync issues where over time, the audio and video sync would become greater and greater until I had to eventually pause and play the movie to get it synced again only for it to do the same thing after a while again. I then started using makeMKV which just muxed the dvd to mkv create a large file size. I ended up doing this for all my movies but I am not concerned about file size since blu-rays take up anywhere from 20 to 40GB uncompressed. I have seen people with compressed versions of blu-rays that are only 10-15GB with almost identical quality as uncompressed.

My question is the best program and settings for compressing video to maintain quality and what has worked for some of you in your experience of compressing video?

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks

-Compwizpro

 

[mrjspeed]

I've been converting my BluRays to MKVs for a few years now, so I'm not sure the best way now because things may have change since I started.

I use MeGUI to convert the video stream to x264. I'm not a pro at what settings, but I have mine set to DXVA-HD-HQ. Thats the second highest quality, the highest being Insane (too long of an encode time for me on that one). DXVA is important because my HTPC's need to use hardware acceleration on the HD movies. I set it to Constant Quality since I don't really care too much about the size. I use a value of 20. Lower is better quality but higher size. I find that 20 is great for almost all movies. Sometimes a movie will have blocking on dark scenes, so I'll redo it at 18 or 19. All my movies are then muxed with the 7.1 english track and the 5.1 Spanish track (for in-laws).

Animated movies like Toy Story compress really well, I end up with files that are 5GB - 8GB. Other movies range anywhere between 8GB and 12GB. When I am ripping a nice action movie like Transformers or Star Trek, I usually put the quality to 18 and end up with a big ~15GB movie. The biggest one I have done to date is Avatar. It ended up being 25GB!

MakeMKV does a lot of steps for you if I'm correct, like demuxing and such etc. The main reason I still use MeGUI and do a lot of "Manual Labor" is because I like to bake in forced subtitles to my movies.

 

[Spion]

Give ripbot264 a try. It's always done a good job when I've used it. Otherwise you can use MeGUI like mrjspeed suggested. It can be slightly intimidating for people new to encoding though.