Original RAW MKV vs. Handbrake Recompression?

[swampdaddy]

How many of you are keeping all of your Blu Ray rips in their original form (full quality, original compression) and not recompressing with Handbrake? Do you see or hear a real quality difference via Plex? In recent history, I've been ripping my collection without recompression, preserving all possible audio and video quality at the expense of disk space. My feeling is that, I don't want to rip these discs again and that in the near future you will have wished you had the uncompressed audio files or the less compressed video files.... Now that my collection is hitting the 6TB mark, larger than any one of my single HDDs, I'm wondering if keeping all of this data is wise. Thoughts?

Thanks,

R

[rui-no-onna]

Full Blu-ray and UHD Blu-ray quality rips here. Alas, a high quality software encode would take a lot of CPU power which I don't have. Intel QuickSync is acceptable speed-wise but I definitely notice increased macro blocking and color banding with it.

Granted, my collection's not as huge as others (less than 200 Blu-ray movies and a handful of 4K) and I only buy maybe 10 movies a year on average.

[xr200]

All the streaming services (eg, Netflix) use compression.
Are you satisfied with the quality of Netflix? If yes,
then Handbrake is a great tool, but does (as already
mentioned) require a lot of CPU and/or time to
process a movie. If no, then you'll have to pony up and
buy more space. I don't think there's a definite
right or wrong answer suitable for everyone.
You're doing the right thing to think about it beforehand.

[Woodstock]

Every disk I have is processed through MakeMKV, then handbrake, before it is viewed. Exception: 3D, which handbrake can't handle. (I have no 3D on my NAS)

My rule of thumb is that, if the story is compelling, a little distortion now and again isn't too bad. If the distortion is annoying, why am I bothering to watch such a boring show?

[rui-no-onna]

All the streaming services (eg, Netflix) use compression. Are you satisfied with the quality of Netflix?

It's easier to be forgiving of Netflix quality given its cost and the fact that I didn't spend 30 minutes to 1 hour ripping the disc and then had the PC unusable for hours on end running Handbrake, StaxRip, etc.

I don't think there's a definite right or wrong answer suitable for everyone. You're doing the right thing to think about it beforehand.

Agreed. The reason I keep full quality now is because I got burned before ripping DVDs and encoding to Xvid/MP3 then later needing to re-rip and encode to H.264/AAC.

I do encode for watching on mobile devices (my upstream bandwidth sucks) so I want the highest quality source available, storage permitting. At 1.6-2.5 cents per GB for HDDs, keeping full quality copies is not yet cost prohibitive with my relatively small collection.

[SamuriHL]

I keep full quality and use plex to scale them on the fly if I'm streaming. Works great.

Sent from my SM-G975U using Tapatalk

[Woodstock]

Regarding the machine being "unusable" when encoding... I encoded the 8 seasons of House MD recently; it took 10 days. 4-core CPU was at 100% the whole time.

However, at the same time, I was ripping BDs from 2 drives, monitoring my security cameras, checking multiple remote servers' status, monitoring my ADS-B receiver, and playing video from time to time. Handbrake sets a low priority for encoding, so most tasks continue to run at decent speed.