My .mkv files much larger than what's floating around.

[NickNewb]

Hi,

This is my first time posting and am new to ripping blu-rays using MakeMKV, so I apologize if this is a totally rudimentary question.

When I rip one of my blu-ray movies, say for instance, The Simpsons Movie, I'll end up with a bunch of .mkv files, one of which will be about 27GB and be the actual movie. I'll convert this to a .m4v file and keep the highest possible quality settings and 5.1 surround sound using either Subler or MKV2MP4 and while everything is great, I'll still end up with a giant file in the area of 25GB or so.

I've purchased the movie from the iTunes Store just to see what Apple is selling and I've seen torrents of the movie, and these files are still 1080p and 5.1 surround, but they're always much, much smaller file sizes (in the area of a few GB). I'm sure they are compressing things, but I've watched the version I purchased from the Apple iTunes Store and compared it to my .mkv rip, and I'm not seeing any obvious compression artifacts in their version or anything (although I'm sure they're probably there).

Space is not an issue for me, and I don't mind having 27GB files, but I'm just trying to figure out why my files are so much larger than the ones I'm seeing out in the wild.

Any help?
Thanks in advance.

[Woodstock]

Visit Handbrake.fr and learn about actually recoding the files into smaller versions. The tools you are using do nothing to shrink the video.

Depending upon the source and the settings you use, switching to h.264 encoding can cut 20-80% of the file size. With animation, I'm seeing closer to 90% for 1080p sources.