joe42 wrote:Movies that have no dark scenes; no large, fast-moving objects, and no very fine details (like intricate designs or or lots of small print) can usually be encoded to a smaller size without any noticeable loss of quality.
But for movies that do have those elements, anyone who watches carefully can tell the difference between the original encoding and the smaller re-encoding.
I made my comparisons using difficult movies -- i.e., those with dark scenes, action, fine detail, etc. The most difficult aspect to control was quality in shadow areas/dark scenes. But it can be done. When there are lots of dark scenes, you just have to use settings that result in larger files. But in no case did I find it impossible to reduce the size of the file by a significant amount. For some movies with lots of darkness, the result might only be a 30-40% reduction in file size. For other movies it is closer to 70 or even 80%. I had a hard time accepting it the first time that happened. How could it
possibly look right when the file size had been reduced so much? But it just happened to be a movie that encodes easily -- little or no grain, few dark scenes, not a lot of fast-moving action.
I also have a large number of sci-fi and action movies. A lot of my testing/comparisons were done with Blade Runner, Avatar, and WALL-E (among others). Believe it or not, the most difficult encode I had was the Pixar movie THE INCREDIBLES, which has a couple scenes that X.264 had trouble encoding without noticeable banding. Most live action stuff works fine.
I put WALL-E and Blade Runner on a USB thumb drive and played them on my friend's 100+" projector through his Plex server. Everybody was impressed. IIRC, encoded WALL-E is about 4 or 4.5 GB with lots of dark scenes (outer space, inside Wall-E's "house," etc. Blade Runner is around 6 or 6.5 GB, also with lots of dark scenes, as anybody familiar with the movie knows. Those are with DTS and AC3 soundtracks, not lossless. Lossless audio would have increased their sizes considerably, but still left them well smaller than the original Blu-ray sizes.
Something else to remember: ALL Blu-ray video is encoded/compressed already. (The video on Blu-ray discs is not 'lossless.') Using HandBrake allows you to exploit the high efficiency of the X.264 encoder to get nearly identical results with smaller on-disc sizes. I say "nearly identical" because there is no way to make it mathematically identical when re-encoding. The only question is this: are the results
noticeably different? With careful encoding, and from normal viewing distances (regardless of screen size*), it is easy to get results that are not noticeably different.
(* I say "regardless of screen size" because screen size tends to correlate with typical viewing distances. Yes, there are exceptions.)
Since my adventure with Plex server and HandBrake-encoded movies began, I've watched at least a couple hundred of them. I don't keep a viewing journal, so I can't tell you exactly how many. But I have only found myself disappointed in the picture quality on four movies so far. Three of the four proved just as disappointing when I popped the Blu-ray into my player to watch it that way instead -- in other words, the fault lay not with HandBrake/re-encoding, but with the source material or the Blu-ray mastering in the first place. The fourth one was one of the first I ever encoded with HandBrake, before I had made my careful comparison tests. Re-encoding with less aggressive settings led to great results.
And it all comes back to that anyway. I have all my original Blu-ray media still, and can go back to it if necessary -- either to watch it unmodified, or to re-encode if desired.
It's been an interesting discussion, but I'm starting to repeat myself. I'm not going to convince anybody to switch their methodology, and that was never my intention anyway. People can try it out for themselves and decide if they want to do it. Or they can never encode anything, and build massive servers with big disk arrays to store everything unmodified from the Blu-ray rip. If that's what you want to do, have at it.
Dave