Encoding/Compressing Blurays and DVDs through Handbrake

[Trader05]

Hey guys,

I have a NAS and WDTV Live streamer setup. I originally ripped all my blurays and dvds with no compression, straight copies with MakeMKV. I wouldn't want to downgrade quality that's noticeable (esp watching on a 65"), but disk space is becoming an issue. I google'd settings and its all over the place, just seeing if anyone does it here and what their opinion is on settings for both Bluray and DVD formats.

Any help/advice highly appreciated!

 

[TheELF]

I wouldn't want to downgrade quality that's noticeable
I google'd settings and its all over the place

Well it's a very subjective thing and obviously BD (and DVD) producers went through a process to choose whatever settings they chose for each movie to retain quality and minimize space (well in the best of cases, they did)

For me the DVDs look ok at ~1500-2000kbit/sec@x.264 (BD=4 times that) if you use the medium preset,profile=high,level=4.1 and dual pass encoding,for you it might look like crap on your 65" screen.

Cut out a small scene of a movie one with some action and camera panning and do some experimenting on that instead of wasting hours on whole movies just to find out it doesn't look good.

 

[Trader05]

Gotcha. Yeah testing small samples sounds like the best way to go about it. Thanks!

 

[Captain_WD]

~snip~

Hey Trader05,

I'd second TheELF's suggestion of testing with smaller samples. Another way of making this work is to simply get an external drive and use the WDTV's USB ports or the NAS's USB ports (if there are any) to expand the capacity of your library.
What's the NAS that you are using?

Captain_WD.

 

[Aikouka]

For Blu-ray encoding, the only change that I usually make is the bitrate and that depends on the resolution: 720p = 5 Mbps and 1080p = 8 Mbps. (I've tweaked those from time to time, but they're usually good starting numbers.) Outside of that, I use h264 4.1, two-pass with turbo first pass, and Medium speed setting.

 

[Trader05]

What's the NAS that you are using?

Captain_WD.

Synology DS213 with 2x 6TB Raid 1 - I need something backed up, I did this before and had a drive crash after a month worth of ripping :/


Aikouka, thanks! I'll check those settings out!

 

[Captain_WD]

~snip~

Well you do have the USB ports and the option to expand its storage with larger DAS or portable external drives so that's an option. You can always back up to an external drive, another NAS or to a cloud storage. It all depends on your budget and needs.

Captain_WD.

 

[JAG87]

For Blu-ray encoding, the only change that I usually make is the bitrate and that depends on the resolution: 720p = 5 Mbps and 1080p = 8 Mbps. (I've tweaked those from time to time, but they're usually good starting numbers.) Outside of that, I use h264 4.1, two-pass with turbo first pass, and Medium speed setting.

You really shouldn't do that, you should just choose a speed preset and a CRF setting. First pick a speed preset you are comfortable with in terms of encoding time (the slower the speed, the better the quality/space ratio will be). After you've picked something that you're comfortable waiting for (don't bother with placebo preset...), pick a CRF that satisfies your quality requirements. Default for x264 is 23, but anything between 18-23 is reasonable for HD material, 18 being the highest quality but probably not much smaller than the original. 23 is good enough for grain-free or video that have a lot of still images, but for busier sources you may want to use 22 or 21.

And that's it, you can just encode over and over always using the same settings. The encoder will decide how much and where to put the bitrate to maintain that same perceived quality across the entire video.

This is the best way to encode with x264 (and x265). Two pass + target bitrate does not allocate bitrate better, it's actually worse.

 

[myocardia]

You really shouldn't do that, you should just choose a speed preset and a CRF setting. First pick a speed preset you are comfortable with in terms of encoding time (the slower the speed, the better the quality/space ratio will be). After you've picked something that you're comfortable waiting for (don't bother with placebo preset...), pick a CRF that satisfies your quality requirements. Default for x264 is 23, but anything between 18-23 is reasonable for HD material, 18 being the highest quality but probably not much smaller than the original. 23 is good enough for grain-free or video that have a lot of still images, but for busier sources you may want to use 22 or 21.

And that's it, you can just encode over and over always using the same settings. The encoder will decide how much and where to put the bitrate to maintain that same perceived quality across the entire video.

This is the best way to encode with x264 (and x265). Two pass + target bitrate does not allocate bitrate better, it's actually worse.

I couldn't agree more. When I first decided to try this whole 'compress my optical disks' thing, all signs from different Google searches led me to believe that using certain bitrates was the way to go. And it is the way to go, if you don't mind your Blu Ray movies looking more or less identical to uncompressed DVDs. If you are used to watching movies that actually look good for the entire movie, you'll want to go with the way that Jag and I do it, with the constant quality settings.

Here are the settings that I use for my Blu Ray discs, and on my tweaked 46-inch screen, I can see no difference between the uncompressed disc, and these settings:

1) Picture tab: Change only 'Cropping' to the Custom setting. Leave all four settings below Custom set to 0.
2) Filters tab: A) Detelecine: Default B) Decomb: Decomb @ Default setting C) Denoise: hqdn3d @ Strong setting Leave completely off. Wasting a tiny bit of HDD space on a couple of DVDs of extremely old videos is 1,000s of times better than making all of your new stuff look comparatively bad. D) Deblock: Off E) Grayscale: unchecked
3) Video tab: A) Video codec: H.264 B) Framerate: Same as source, with Variable Framerate C) Quality: Constant quality @ 18. This will give you constant quality on every one of your Blu Rays, with shorter (85-95 minute comedies) being lesser amount of data. Since I only have a tweaked 46" TV, and you have a 65-incher, you may very well need to go down (up in quality) to the 17 setting. Expect 20-25% larger file sizes with the 17 setting, though.

BTW, the file sizes are pretty tiny. My largest file is 11.6 GB, averaging between 5 & 8 GB, with my smallest full Blu Ray movie @ 2.75 GB. The more action a movie has, the larger the compressed file will be, and the longer the movie, the larger the file will be. All four of the Shrek movies are 3.XX GB, for instance. All of my Blu Rays were encoded with the exact settings in the paragraph above and the paragraph below. All of my DVDs were encoded with those settings as well, with only the constant quality setting changed to 19, instead of 18. DVDs become as small as 500 MB, and only a few of them being much larger than one GB, with ~1.5 GB being a rarity.

Having a fairly fast "main" system, the 4.4 Ghz 4970k that is in my signature, I played around with the settings under the Optimize Video settings. You will get the best mixture of quality videos with the smallest amount of data from using the 'Slower' X.264 preset. Now, it takes longer than the settings to the left of it, but there is a discernible difference between them. I can personally even see a noticeable difference between the 'Slower' and 'Slow' settings, with 'Slow' ending up a larger file size. I (personally) could see no difference at all between the 'Slower' and 'Slowest' setting, even though the file size roughly doubled, and the encoding time went from ~4 hours to more than 20 hours.

The settings you will need for the bottom of the Video tab are dependent upon how robust your playback device happens to be. I wanted to make sure that I would have no problems playing back my files on any device that I own, including my 1.3 Ghz Atom tablet, so I encoded them using an H.264 profile of Main, and an H.264 level of 4.0. You'll have to either check around with Google, or just try out different compression settings for yourself, with your older WDTV device.

Lastly, the audio tab. For DVDs, you don't need to change anything. At least, I never needed to change anything. For Blu Rays, though, if you don't specifically tell Handbrake which language you want encoded, you will end up with gorgeous re-encodes, with zero audio tracks of any type! Assuming you and everyone in your household speaks English, you only need to 'Add' English to the right hand panel. Feel free to save a few GB (total, not per movie) by limiting which of the audio tracks to include, but I personally include them all. It doesn't add much data, and if/when my audio setup changes, my encodes will already be prepared.

Oh, one more thing. Make sure to save your settings! I have two different settings, one for DVD and one for Blu Rays. These are added settings, that will appear below the User Presets on the right hand side of Handbrake. Good luck.

edit: After you have everything all figured out, as far as quality settings and compression settings, you can then setup a huge 'queue' of movies to do one after the other, with no input needed from you. My 4790k takes between 2.5 and 5.5 hours per Blu Ray, with both being rare. Nearly all of my Blu Rays took between 3 hours and 4 hours, with some between 4 and 4½ hours. If your fastest computer is half as fast, it will take twice as long. If your fastest computer has twice as many cores/threads at roughly the same speed, it will take half as long.

edit #2: BTW, on my system, DVD movies take 25-45 minutes to re-encode, depending on their length and the amount of action, with a couple of the very longest taking right at an hour. Also, note that not using denoising will not only make your movies look better, it will also add at least 30-40% 20-25% more data to the encode, as I've discovered. Of course, that's the portion of the movie data that you did not want to remove, so it's still a good thing. Either way, the amount of data you'll need to store will be many times less than storing them uncompressed, as you have been.

See the post below by JAG87 for the reason not to use denoising on your digital movie data.

 

[Trader05]

^^YES, that's exactly what I was looking for! Thanks guys!

 

[smitbret]

I couldn't agree more. When I first decided to try this whole 'compress my optical disks' thing, all signs from different Google searches led me to believe that using certain bitrates was the way to go. And it is the way to go, if you don't mind your Blu Ray movies looking more or less identical to uncompressed DVDs. If you are used to watching movies that actually look good for the entire movie, you'll want to go with the way that Jag and I do it, with the constant quality settings.

Here are the settings that I use for my Blu Ray discs, and on my tweaked 46-inch screen, I can see no difference between the uncompressed disc, and these settings:

1) Picture tab: Change only 'Cropping' to the Custom setting. Leave all four settings below Custom set to 0.
2) Filters tab: A) Detelecine: Default B) Decomb: Decomb @ Default setting C) Denoise: hqdn3d @ Strong setting D) Deblock: Off E) Grayscale: unchecked
3) Video tab: A) Video codec: H.264 B) Framerate: Same as source, with Variable Framerate C) Quality: Constant quality @ 18. This will give you constant quality on every one of your Blu Rays, with shorter (85-95 minute comedies) being lesser amount of data. Since I only have a tweaked 46" TV, and you have a 65-incher, you may very well need to go down (up in quality) to the 17 setting. Expect 20-25% larger file sizes with the 17 setting, though.

BTW, the file sizes are pretty tiny. My largest file is 11.6 GB, averaging between 5 & 8 GB, with my smallest full Blu Ray movie @ 2.75 GB. The more action a movie has, the larger the compressed file will be, and the longer the movie, the larger the file will be. All four of the Shrek movies are 3.XX GB, for instance. All of my Blu Rays were encoded with the exact settings in the paragraph above and the paragraph below. All of my DVDs were encoded with those settings as well, with only the constant quality setting changed to 19, instead of 18. DVDs become as small as 500 MB, and only a few of them being much larger than one GB, with ~1.5 GB being a rarity.

Having a fairly fast "main" system, the 4.4 Ghz 4970k that is in my signature, I played around with the settings under the Optimize Video settings. You will get the best mixture of quality videos with the smallest amount of data from using the 'Slower' X.264 preset. Now, it takes longer than the settings to the left of it, but there is a discernible difference between them. I can personally even see a noticeable difference between the 'Slower' and 'Slow' settings, with 'Slow' ending up a larger file size. I (personally) could see no difference at all between the 'Slower' and 'Slowest' setting, even though the file size roughly doubled, and the encoding time went from ~4 hours to more than 20 hours.

The settings you will need for the bottom of the Video tab are dependent upon how robust your playback device happens to be. I wanted to make sure that I would have no problems playing back my files on any device that I own, including my 1.3 Ghz Atom tablet, so I encoded them using an H.264 profile of Main, and an H.264 level of 4.0. You'll have to either check around with Google, or just try out different compression settings for yourself, with your older WDTV device.

Lastly, the audio tab. For DVDs, you don't need to change anything. At least, I never needed to change anything. For Blu Rays, though, if you don't specifically tell Handbrake which language you want encoded, you will end up with gorgeous re-encodes, with zero audio tracks of any type! Assuming you and everyone in your household speaks English, you only need to 'Add' English to the right hand panel. Feel free to save a few GB (total, not per movie) by limiting which of the audio tracks to include, but I personally include them all. It doesn't add much data, and if/when my audio setup changes, my encodes will already be prepared.

Oh, one more thing. Make sure to save your settings! I have two different settings, one for DVD and one for Blu Rays. These are added settings, that will appear below the User Presets on the right hand side of Handbrake. Good luck.

edit: After you have everything all figured out, as far as quality settings and compression settings, you can then setup a huge 'queue' of movies to do one after the other, with no input needed from you. My 4790k takes between 2.5 and 5.5 hours per movie, with both being rare. Nearly all of my movies took between 3 hours and 4 hours, with some between 4 and 4½ hours. If your fastest computer is half as fast, it will take twice as long. If your fastest computer has twice as many cores/threads at roughly the same speed, it will take half as long.

Those settings are almost identical to mine. I do get an outlier now and then. I just ripped and encoded Shindler's List and it came back at 25GB. The Transformers movies are also pretty consistently in the 18GB+ arena. Most of my animated stuff comes back ranging 3.5-4.5GB and typical BD rips are about 8-10GB.

 

[JAG87]

I couldn't agree more.

CRF 18 is really heavy handed with the bitrate, on some busy scenes if gives it even more bitrate than the source. But if you use the slow preset, then it might be necessary to maintain good quality throughout the entire thing. However, if you have the machine for it and you step down to slowest (placebo is just silly), you can do amazing things with CRF 22, and even 23 if the image is static enough (like animation). It really depends on the source though.

I strongly disagree with the denoising preset to strong, this preset uses strong spatial denoising and it softens the picture a lot. It makes HD look like up-scaled SD in some cases. You should only be using mild temporal denoising settings such as 0:0:3:3 to clean up grain from your source without blurring it (if there isn't any grain, it won't do anything). This will allow the encoder to use much less bitrate and give you smaller files, or better quality for same file size.

 

[smitbret]

CRF 18 is really heavy handed with the bitrate, on some busy scenes if gives it even more bitrate than the source. But if you use the slow preset, then it might be necessary to maintain good quality throughout the entire thing. However, if you have the machine for it and you step down to slowest (placebo is just silly), you can do amazing things with CRF 22, and even 23 if the image is static enough (like animation). It really depends on the source though.

I strongly disagree with the denoising preset to strong, this preset uses strong spatial denoising and it softens the picture a lot. It makes HD look like up-scaled SD in some cases. You should only be using mild temporal denoising settings such as 0:0:3:3 to clean up grain from your source without blurring it (if there isn't any grain, it won't do anything). This will allow the encoder to use much less bitrate and give you smaller files, or better quality for same file size.

Yeah, I missed that the first time around. Using the Denoise filter without a specific purpose in mind is a pointless way to needlessly reduce sharpness and grain and make your encode take a lot longer. I just leave it off unless I have a reason. Why would you really want to denoise a DVD or Blu-Ray rip in the first place?

 

[JAG87]

Yeah, I missed that the first time around. Using the Denoise filter without a specific purpose in mind is a pointless way to needlessly reduce sharpness and grain and make your encode take a lot longer. I just leave it off unless I have a reason. Why would you really want to denoise a DVD or Blu-Ray rip in the first place?

Because there are many instances where movies have noise that adds to the bitrate requirement for no reason at all. This is not really a problem on most modern movies (which are almost completely noise free) unless it's done on purpose by the producer, but it's pretty common on older movies due to older camera sensors generating more noise, especially in low light, and the fact that older movies were shot on film.

Now spatial denoising is more aggressive than temporal denoising, but I still wouldn't use it because it takes away too much detail. Temporal denoising only cleans differences between frames, not on each frame by itself, so it doesn't affect the overall sharpness of the image very much. A mild temporal denoise setting can reduce your file size up to 20-30% for noise heavy sources. For noise free sources it won't do much, but it also won't deteriorate the image.

 

[myocardia]

CRF 18 is really heavy handed with the bitrate, on some busy scenes if gives it even more bitrate than the source. But if you use the slow preset, then it might be necessary to maintain good quality throughout the entire thing. However, if you have the machine for it and you step down to slowest (placebo is just silly), you can do amazing things with CRF 22, and even 23 if the image is static enough (like animation). It really depends on the source though.

Well, I am like the OP. I don't at all mind giving up some amount of storage space, to be able to not lose any picture quality whatsoever, which is what makes what I'm saying below so sad.

I strongly disagree with the denoising preset to strong, this preset uses strong spatial denoising and it softens the picture a lot. It makes HD look like up-scaled SD in some cases. You should only be using mild temporal denoising settings such as 0:0:3:3 to clean up grain from your source without blurring it (if there isn't any grain, it won't do anything). This will allow the encoder to use much less bitrate and give you smaller files, or better quality for same file size.

PLEASE tell me that you're kidding! I may only have ~100ish Blu Rays, but I have way over 1,000 DVDs. No, not more than 1,000 movies. I only have around 500 movies on DVD. More than half of the DVDs are television shows that I own. I own every episode ever filmed of the majority of my favorite sitcoms, and quite a few seasons of other shows. Eleven seasons of Married With Children, eight seasons of That 70s Show, nine seasons of Seinfeld, nine seasons of The King of Queens, ten seasons of Friends, nine seasons of Scrubs, and the eight of the nine seasons of How I Met Your Mother that I have so far account for an utterly huge pile of them.

Man, good thing that I have a fairly fast system, huh? Also, I have 100% of the Blu Rays I've ripped, and at least 80-90% of the DVDs still on HDDs in uncompressed form, so maybe it'll only take me a month or two of having my 4790k re-encoding 24/7! BTW, I'm gonna edit my original post to reflect what you've said.

edit #2: How could I forget to thank you, for letting us know about this? I don't know either, but thanks a bunch. Then again, I DID also forget to list one of my very favorite sitcoms ever, Big Bang Theory, so I guess I'm just forgetful!

Yeah, I missed that the first time around. Using the Denoise filter without a specific purpose in mind is a pointless way to needlessly reduce sharpness and grain and make your encode take a lot longer. I just leave it off unless I have a reason. Why would you really want to denoise a DVD or Blu-Ray rip in the first place?

Believe it or not, I just don't like noise. Since I've never personally seen a DVD or a Blu Ray encoded with noise on them, except films from WWII and the like, I had just assumed that the re-encoding process introduced noise of some sort. I actually spent quite a bit of time googling how to use Handbrake, before I started using it. Denoising was the only thing that I wrongly assumed I didn't need to research. I don't like noise, and I have a very capable computer to do the re-encoding with, so it made sense to me to just hastily jump to getting rid of all noise. Hey, it made sense at the time!

edit: BTW, the amount of extra time that it takes to re-encode a Blu Ray movie using the strongest level of denoising versus no denoising whatsoever is zero. You will just end up with as much as twice the data in the encode. Not that that is a bad thing, since that's the portion of the movie/show that I had removed before, that shouldn't have been removed! I know this because I saw this post last night before I went to bed, and decided to test it out, to be sure. The first movie in my re-encoding of every optical disk that I own was the Blu Ray 3:10 To Yuma. With the strongest denoising setting, it was a 5.90 GB file. With zero denoising, and every other setting identical, it is now a 10.99 GB7.19 GB file. They took more or less identical amounts of time, though. As with everything else, the amount will vary widely from movie to movie.

edit #2: Well, I figured out how I seemingly turned a 5.90GB movie into a 10.99GB movie. Being sleepy, I had forgotten to change my audio settings from the default settings. If you do not click on the 'Switch to Defaults' button in the Audio tab, it encodes every audio track available. In the US, that can be as many as 6 separate high-bit audio tracks, depending on the movie.* If you click on the Switch to Defaults button, you can choose which tracks to encode. Since I only speak English, and cannot stand listening to a boring director talk all of the way though a film, I only include a single audio version, the one in English, without anyone but the actors speaking. To also do this, just select First Matching Selected Language from the pull-down menu, then scroll to the language you speak, and click the Move Right button. If you need to encode more than one language, just select the additional language(s), and change the drop-down to All Selected Languages.

* In North America, three major languages are spoken: American English, French, and Spanish. Quite a few Blu Rays have the option to play any of the three. Also, it's not unusual to have the option of hearing the director blather in English. Some Blu Rays also have the option to hear the director translated into French or Spanish. As you can see, choosing to only hear the actors in one language saves you as much as 3.8GB per movie.

 

[Anteaus]

High Quality, CQ set at 15-16, audio convert to AC3 5.1 or passthrough for DVD AC3. Decomb turned on. No chapters. That's roughly what I do for Blu-ray. DVD I increase CQ to 13.

This is somewhat overkill, but I have no problem trading a bit more disk space to get closer to placebo. I am incredibly sensitive (perhaps a bit anal? ) to artifacts when watching films on very large screens, especially in darker screens where dithering becomes an issue with lower CQ. I also review every MKV in VLC prior to encoding to confirm what the crop should be. Handbrake doesn't always do the best job and noise can often been seen on the sides with DVD content.

Its very subjective and this is just my opinion. YMMV.

 

[myocardia]

High Quality, CQ set at 15-16, audio convert to AC3 5.1 or passthrough for DVD AC3. Decomb turned on. No chapters. That's roughly what I do for Blu-ray. DVD I increase CQ to 13.

This is somewhat overkill, but I have no problem trading a bit more disk space to get closer to placebo. I am incredibly sensitive (perhaps a bit anal? ) to artifacts when watching films on very large screens, especially in darker screens where dithering becomes an issue with lower CQ. I also review every MKV in VLC prior to encoding to confirm what the crop should be. Handbrake doesn't always do the best job and noise can often been seen on the sides with DVD content.

Its very subjective and this is just my opinion. YMMV.

What size TV do you have? BTW, if you would stop cropping your encodes, you'd be able to get the same quality with lower CQ, and most likely smaller file sizes, since cropping doesn't seem to reduce file size much, but having to stretch the picture reduces picture quality pretty considerably. BTW, what kind of file size reduction are you getting with DVDs at CQ 13?

edit: Just thought of something. Are you using one of the lower quality/much faster x.264 presets, like Fast or Medium, instead of one of the slower, much higher quality presets, like Slower (which is what I use), or even Slowest? If so, then it makes sense to use a higher CQ setting, although I still believe you'd have smaller file sizes, and at least as good of picture quality with CQ 17-18, with a higher quality preset like Slower.

 

[Aikouka]

And that's it, you can just encode over and over always using the same settings. The encoder will decide how much and where to put the bitrate to maintain that same perceived quality across the entire video.

This is the best way to encode with x264 (and x265). Two pass + target bitrate does not allocate bitrate better, it's actually worse.

I used to use Constant Quality for quite a while, but I kept having issues getting certain videos to look good. I think I encoded The Last Starfighter 3-4 times at different RF values (I usually use between 20-22), and I never ended up with something that I found acceptable. I think my first encode was about 6GB and seemed lackluster compared to the 10GB one, which isn't a huge surprise given the disparity. When I switched to CBR, I actually got a file that I thought looked good and wasn't ridiculous in size -- probably somewhere between the 6GB and 10GB.

 

[thesmokingman]

I would look into hevc too.