HandBrake Settings

[Lord Chabelo]

I need to compress the size of my Jellyfin media collection so I finally started putting my backup files through HandBrake. I started with one of the biggest space hogs Stranger Things Season 5 where a single episode can be around 20 GB. I have played with numerous settings;
Encoder set to x264 and x265
Preset set from medium through every setting down to placebo
Constant quality from 24 all the way down to 16
Framerate always same as source
Container has been set to mkv or mp4

The result is always the same, the video looks blocky on my 4K tv running Jellyfin. PC and phone look okay, but you really can't see the blockyness I spot on faces in smaller screens. The source was blu-ray discs. Any ideas what setting I can use to avoid video quality loss?

[billbillw]

Which built in preset do you start with before making those changes? I have made my presets starting with Matroska>H265 MKV 2160p60 4K then make adjustments to Constant Quality RF18, Constant Framerate-same as source, Encoder Options Medium and set the Audio to Auto passthrough. I don't touch anything in the Filter section. I've been using these settings for over a year and never had issue with picture quality, even with a 100" projection screen. If these settings aren't working on your playback setup, I'm not sure what the issue could be, but it is not Handbrake

[dcoke22]

Are you trying to keep things at 4K resolution or are you willing to go down to 1080 or less?

Personally, I prefer the .mkv container. It is more flexible than the .mp4 container.

I also prefer to transcode things to 10-bit h.265 using a two-pass encoding.