Compressing 1080p films while maintaining highest quality

[Kit]

How gents?

I have a **** ton of mkv's now but they are all giant - like 30gb.

I want to keep them at a high quality but trim them down size wise.

Still have handbrake on here. What is my best method?

[Digfox]

Personally I use the following main settings for BluRay rips (MakeMKV > Handbrake):

• Picture > Anamorphic = Strict
• Filters > All off
• Video > Framerate (FPS) = Same as source & Constant Framerate
• Video > Quality = Constant Quality 18 RF
• Audio > Up the bitrate to 256
• Then add subtitles (forced or otherwise) as necessary.

End result is typically 60% - 40% compression in the file size depending on the film. Some animated features see a significantly higher reduction. I tested one BluRay at various RF levels until I found the sweetspot to be about 16-18 RF to get something that is very close in picture quality to the original BluRay but becomes a more manageable file size. Sound films (Aliens) had to been encoded at a lower quality setting otherwise ended up at a larger size than the original file. but this is working for most that I've ripped.

Playing the end results fine on a combination of PC's, iPad, Google Nexus 7 and Rasperry Pi running Rasplex.

[Kit]

Thanks mgear!

Will be referring back to this as I go.

My current usb film only hdd is full at 512gb.

Lets see how much it can be cut down by eh.

[Digfox]

No worries and good luck.

Tbh I'm sure if that is 512GB of BR rips you'll easily bring that down in size. I personally don't see the point in having actual BR rips when trying to stream films particularly where the HD audio is lost when encoding the film. I tend to find I watch the film the first time via disc and then it's just a case of wanting to archive the film for future use and to save space.

As mentioned it is case by case though, in that as an example, I ripped Fellowship of the Ring (2-disc, extended BR) and used MKmerge to join the two parts into a 50GB file. After using the settings above (with forced subtitles for the Elven parts) I ended up with a 13GB file that was simply too compressed, so will have to adjust the settings for this particular film.

[Kit]

Great start. Did a tester using a recent animated blu ray - I thought this would be ideal to see the difference. It's gone from 11gb to about 1.5 and the image quality is lower but cstill good - don't know the techy terms but it feels like going from 1920x1080 to 1650x1050 quality wise on a 1920x1080 monitor.

Really pleased.

[Digfox]

Didn't see the update, glad it's gone well. Animated or films with intense CGI do compress far better and I'm not exactly sure as to the reasons why. As mentioned I've found the settings above really provide a near-BluRay end result but achieve a nice compression ratio. That said it does vary by film.