www.makemkv.com

New to makemkv and am using it to rip my home dvd collection for Plex. I also have been running it through handbrake. I recently discovered that Plex can play mkv files. If so, why am I converting them to m4v files with handbrake. Any advantage to this?

Handbrake makes the files smaller (usual settings). That has advantages in storage.

If you're only putting the files into Plex, you can leave them in a .mkv container. Choice of container (.mkv file or .m4v file) Is generally independent of deciding to compress the file to save space.

Handbrake, as Woodstock said, allows you to compress the files to use less space. DVDs aren't very large, relatively speaking. I know of lots of people who don't even bother to compress DVDs. Blu-rays are often 5x - 10x bigger than DVDs, so most people choose to use Handbrake or similar to save some space on their Piex server.

Modern Handbrake has decent support for hardware assisted video compression. Since you asked about .m4v files, I'm going to assume you're using a Mac. Apple Video Toolbox support in Handbrake Hardware encoding might not produce the same output as software based encoding. It depends on your hardware. It will almost assuredly produce output significantly faster than software based encoding.

Thank you, Woodstock, and Dcoke. I should have said I'm running it on a Synology DS920 which supports hardware encoding. I'm guessing mkv is the way to go. Luckily, I kept both versions.

Encoding or decoding? My Synology 8-drive units support decoding for feeding output, but I haven't been watching their hardware much over the years.

Hardware encoding is a bit of a wash for what I do. It can move faster than software, but it doesn't encode as well. It's one of the things you "give up" when you go with hardware. If you NEED the speed, software just isn't going to keep up. But... rarely can I find the time to watch stuff as fast as the hardware can encode it. So I use handbrake a LOT.