Help with Handbreak settings

[Jarazix]

Hello all,

I am trying to turn all my vob folders into .mkv files.

I am trying to figure out what the best settings are for video quality. This is for a Win7 Media Center output to a 50" tv. Quality matters, but some space savings would be nice. I am looking for near to 0% visual degredation with 30-50% space savings.

Is this doable? and at what settings? 2 passes at normal settings looked only so-so with 1500 bit rate. Should I deinterlace and use noise reduction? Should I set quality percentage? Does number of passes really help?

I would love to use handbreak since its an easy gui and I can queue up all my jobs, and just let it go at it.

 

[Snowknight26]

I am trying to figure out what the best settings are for video quality.

The best quality is the original quality - don't touch the video, just change containers from VOB to MKV.

I am looking for near to 0% visual degredation with 30-50% space savings.

You can't really choose the quality degredation and space saved as it doesn't work that way. If you want a real 0% loss in quality, you'd be saving a small amount of space because of the VOB files' overhead. However, if you are adamant about saving space at a percieved loss of close to 0%...

Is this doable? and at what settings? 2 passes at normal settings looked only so-so with 1500 bit rate.

Don't do 2-pass mode, do CRF (assuming you're using x264 in Handbrake, which you should be). The smaller the CRF, the higher the quality and bitrate. I've found that with the latest x264 builds, which hopefully Handbrake comes packaged with, 16.5-18 is a good range.

Should I deinterlace and use noise reduction?

If you aren't going to deinterlace, that means one of two things. You either want your video card to do the deinterlacing, in which case you want to keep the source (which you don't?), or you want to use a suboptimal source for your encoding. Therefore, always deinterlace. Progressive encoding is much better than encoding from an interlaced source.

As fas as denoising goes.. denoising would remove detail, which is something you hopefully shouldn't want, assuming you're going for the best quality:size ratio.

Should I set quality percentage? Does number of passes really help?

See above.

If you aren't doing quality mode (CRF is the standard, QP is one you shouldn't use), only use 2-pass. You'll only get a miniscule benefit from doing 3-passes (aka, don't do it), so if you insist on doing more than one pass, stick with two.


This should really be moved to a different forum. HTPC?