Inconsistent File Size

[Mtenga]

I just ripped Gomorrah Season 3 bluray. There are 12 episodes and eleven are of the size 8.1Gb-11.5Gb. However, for some reason Episode 6 is only 3.7Gb. It was ripped in the same way as the others and has the 5.1 Italian track and English subtitles just like the others. Seems to be the full thing when I play on VLC.

I don't understand why it should be so much smaller in size than the others when it is roughly the same length in time?

[Woodstock]

When video is not compressed, the file size is dependent only on how long you were recording. The moment you start compressing, that goes out the window.

Is episode 6 a rather "sedate" episode, that is, not a lot of movement in scenes, less complex backgrounds, etc? These things contribute to better compression than complex, moving backgrounds, lots of foreground action, or even "grainy" video. 30 minutes of "talking heads" will be smaller than 10 minutes of 10,000,000,000 Daleks attacking Gallifrey....

[preserve]

Episodes can definitely vary between discs depending on how many episodes there are per disc, what other content is put on the disc (bonus features), and how conscious the authoring and encoding folks are being about maximizing available space and distributing it evenly according to episode length. As just one example, 3-disc shows with 10 episodes and minimum bonus features can have 6 episodes with very high quality (only 3 per disc) and then the remaining 4 have to fit onto the third disc and so they're generally smaller, especially if they've maxed out the rest to take advantage of the space (definitely not always the case). Even with DVDs the same thing would happen, so this isn't a new problem. Well I could talk about this subject all day LOL... But this is definitely the first time I have ever heard of such a small episode on Blu-ray for an "hour" show, or such a large difference in episode sizes (usually the variation is within a few gigs).

[Mtenga]

Yes I am yet to see such a large variation in size on a single episode hence the post. But it all seems to be there so it is what it is.