www.makemkv.com

I'm not an expert on makemkv but I believe I have the basics down.

So far I have ripped blu-ray movies two ways. The first is by doing a disc backup. I'll find the m2ts file that has the main movie on it and open it with handbrake and convert it using MKV container and keep the audio as passthrough and the rest I will usually us rf at 18 and the same ratio as native. The end result is usually somewhere between 6-9 gig file. The audio is the exact same as the original with DTS. However the image is (almost) identical. I have a 42 inch 1080p tv and I cant really tell any difference from the original.

My question is, is the difference from the original to the compressed more noticeable on a larger display? Like if you have a projector screen or a 65 inch tv? I don't want to compress all these movies thinking that i'm not missing out on anything and then later when I buy a much larger display find out that they don't compare to the original.

I'm just curious what methods you guys use. With storage becoming cheaper and cheaper it's becoming a lot more tempting for me to just keep the files in the original format and not worry about handbrake or any compression whatsoever. I don't know though, i'm a little torn on what to do. If you guys want to persuade me to one way or the other that may help an indecisive person like me.

First, a quick comment about your method. If your only purpose in ripping is to put the movie on a media PC or Plex server or whatever, then there's no need to do a full-disc backup and search for the appropriate m2ts file. Just rip the appropriate track to an MKV file, and use handbrake from there. Note that there is absolutely no quality loss going from m2ts on the blu-ray disc to the MKV file (no video conversion is taking place).

As to your question... I have used Handbrake at RF 21 for the majority of my conversions and they look fantastic on both a 55" LCD and a 64" plasma. RF 18 seems like overkill to me. In most cases, you're taking up additional disk space for no noticeable benefit. There are *rare* exceptions, but I'd rather re-encode at RF 20 or 19 when that happens. No point chewing up all that disc space for every film.

FWIW, my settings start with the "High Profile" preset, and are modified from there (such as changing the constant quality setting, audio options, etc).

Dave