Removing subtitles doesn't make file sizes much smaller

[kelsien]

Hi. I'm new to using MakeMKV. I'm working on ripping some of my tv shows off dvds. I ripped 6 episodes from 1 disc and they are 4.94 GB in total. Then, I realized I could unselect the subtitle tracks. So I re-ripped them, but the total size only went down to 4.92 GB. Is this typical? Is there another way to reduce the file size? I plan on running them through Handbrake to compress them a bit (as found in other threads here). Thanks for the help!

[Woodstock]

Subtitles take up very little space in video, with occasional exceptions.

Leaving them out would primarily be a benefit if you have a player that displays them when you don't want them.

[Bucher]

Subtitles are quite often in .srt format (plain text). I just reencoded videos with Handbrake. Btw, x265 is more size-efficient in comparison to x264.

[Woodstock]

Actually, text-based subtitles are rare on commercial DVD and BD sources.

But the image-based subtitles uses on DVD (VOBSUB) and BD (PGS) are actually pretty space-efficient; you have a transparent image with a limited color pallet compressed in a manner similar to GIF or PNG encoding, a time to start displaying it, and a duration for how long to display it.

[dcoke22]

As an example, I looked at a MKV rip of a DVD movie I have using MediaInfo.

The total size is 5.66GiB.
The video is 5.02GiB of that total.
The AC-3 5.1 audio track of 370MiB.
There are two stereo AC-3 audio tracks at 132MiB each.
There are 3 subtitle tracks. The smallest is 3.73MiB. The largest is 6.89MiB.

Compressing your rips is a good way to save space. Also, external hard drives can often be had for less than $20 per terabyte (in the US at least).