www.makemkv.com

Sorry if this has been discussed before but I cannot find such discussion.

I was wondering what people thought of the quality between the full copy (mkv) of a DVD vs making a full copy of a Blu-ray and then converting it to a mp4. Does a full copy of a DVD have better quality than a mp4 of a blu-ray? My tv and computer setup aren't that nice but my initial impressions is that the mp4 of a blu-ray rip is better than a full rip of a DVD. I ask this as a full Blu-ray rip takes a lot of space whereas the mp4 takes about the same amount of space as a full rip of a dvd.

Anybody else test this out or has there been reports as to the quality written somewhere. A part of me likes making a complete copy and not converting but converting the blu-ray to mp4 might be the way to go instead of a full rip of a dvd.

Thanks for any input.

Todd

Loaded question - you can convert a BD to an MP4 with a LOT of different settings that will cause it to have lower-than-DVD quality.

However, an MKV of a DVD as extracted from the DVD has a limited resolution, and is not well compressed by today's standards. A BD has a higher resolution to start with, so you can compress the BD quite a bit before it drops to the resolution/quality of the DVD, when viewed on a 1080p monitor.

Example: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Raw DVD MKV is about 7GB or so, and has an effective resolution of about 360p, once you take the black bars off the top and bottom. The BD version, using the "high quality" compression settings in Handbrake, creates and MP4 file of about 7.3GB, and is 1080p resolution. Watch both on a 55" screen, and you will see NOTICEABLE differences between them.

The amount of compression is also going to vary with the source, with factors like "noise", and motion coming into play. Sometimes, a "clean" BD source can compress to smaller than the equivalent raw DVD file, while maintaining the quality, simply because the compression on DVDs is so bad.

Considering I can take a DVD and re-encode it to make it better than the original I consider this a moot point!

ndjamena wrote:Considering I can take a DVD and re-encode it to make it better than the original I consider this a moot point!

How do you make something better than the original?

AVISynth.

-Edit- And as always with these things, 'better' is subjective and it depends on the source. But whenever you encounter one of the all too frequent DVDs with bad frame-rate conversions or chroma problems etc. making it 'better' is easy.

For us, using Handbrake to rip a Blu-Ray to 720P is better than DVD quality especially if it contains a good HD sound track.

We have several dvds that actually looked better after using Handbrake with "all the bells and whistles" high quality options . For example with our Stargate SG1 DVD collection some times I can see a screen type grid for an instant as it switches between some (not all) scenes but after using Handbrake the video no longer has that effect. Don't know what causes that effect and my wife says she does not see it but I do. Operation Petticoat did the same thing and looks better after using Handbrake but will be buying the Blu-Ray version soon.

If you're in PAL land then I have the answer. StarGate SG-1 was shot on film as 23.976fps, then telecined to NTSC 29.97fps using pull-down. When converting to PAL 25fps they applied an Inverse Telecine filter on each episode to get it back to 23.976, then speed it up to 25fps and presumably adjusted the pitch of the audio to compensate. The glitches between scenes is caused by the Inverse Telecine filter not finding enough matches at the scene-cuts. I assume you're the only one who notices it because you're the only one who's watched it using VLC with the de-interlacing filter off. Yes it's a pain, thankfully, in the few SG-1 discs I looked at I didn't see any true 29.97 patches or any 29.97 special effects overlayed on the video. That doesn't mean they're not there though. There are more downsides to the conversion process of course, the PAL dvds run slightly shorter than the NTSC versions, the audio is off a tad and since they were upsized from 480i to 576i the PAL versions have less real resolution than their NTSC counterparts.

The NTSC discs of SG-1 aren't great either (mix of pulldown flags and hard telecine being the most annoying issue). Hopefully they'll come out on Blu-ray some day.

We were mostly using a Sony 400 disk NTSC stand alone dvd player. We don't watch SG1 episodes too often these days, we processed our 4 or 5 favorite episodes with Handbrake,and use a set top media player and those play pretty good now. Makemkv, Handbrake and a set top media player is really all we use these days, I don't have any stand alone DVD players hooked up to our TV.

Very few of my disks have ever been played in a stand-alone DVD or BD player. They arrive, go into the computer for ripping, handbrake processing to the media server, and the disks go into storage.

I especially won't let the KIDS borrow a DVD or BD... they have their own media player to pull what they want from. Far fewer destroyed disks that way.