www.makemkv.com

I finally got a libre drive 4K drive setup and did my first rip. Bought the accountant, ripped flawlessly to about a 60 Gig mkv file that I was able to watch using VLC, but it plays a little rough with occasional video glitches, and stalls occasionally on my 2012 MacBook Pro.

first question... my 4K samsung monitor is capable of 3840 x 2160 but I couldn't see any difference in picture quality or performance by switching my display resolution between the 3840 x 2160 resolution and the 1920 x 1080 that I normally use.

second question... should I re-encode the video in handbrake or something else for better performance with playback? I have plenty of drive space so not overly concerned about file size, but don't want to waste drive space if not needed. Handbrake reports this info when I load the file: The Accountant, 3840x2160, 23.976 FPS, 15 audio tracks, 27 subtitles tracks. yes, I just ripped all the languages and subtitles for the fun of it to see how it worked. The only 4K output format in handbrake that seems like a good candidate for encoding is: Web / Vimeo YouTube HQ 2160p60 4K. I would greatly appreciate any pointers or advice what the best next steps are.

Generally speaking, transcoding UHDs is complicated because most of them have some kind of HDR. Specifically, The Accountant (2016) appears to be a 'plain' HDR release (as opposed to HDR+ or Dolby Vision). I believe recent versions of Handbrake support preserving that HDR data and the wider color palette of UHDs during a transcode. So, in theory, you could transcode this movie using Handbrake and have it still have proper colors and HDR. Doing so would undoubtedly take many hours on a 2012 MacBook Pro.

A better question is why bother? UHDs almost always come with a 1080p blu-ray copy as well. If you're just going to watch the movie on your laptop screen or generic computer monitor, the blu-ray version is probably enough. And they're easy to compress to modest sizes with minimal perceptible quality loss. If you have a modern 4K TV where the higher resolution, wider color palette and HDR can be experienced, why lessen the impact by throwing out data to make the file smaller?

As a side note, audio tracks can add up to non-trivial space in a rip. MediaInfo can tell you information about your .mkv file, including how many hundreds of megabytes or how many gigabytes each audio track takes up. For example, my rip of Anna (2019) has 2 audio tracks that total about 3.5 GB, with the lossless Dolby TrueHD track being just over 3 GB.