Best lossy format for DVD rips?

warren_1979 · 30 Nov 2019 at 13:24

Hi.

I'm thinking of downsizing a little and selling my DVD collection. What is the best lossy format for DVD backup? I know I should do lossless but I haven't got the HD space at the moment.

I've used handbrake a few times to create M4V files of about 1GB and quality seemed OK.

Is there any current format that could create close to perfect lossy conversions?

Donnie Fisher · 30 Nov 2019 at 18:43

H.265 will generally compress to a smaller size than h.264 but can take a bit longer to do.

Or for a given final file size, h.265 will achieve a higher quality image.

But realistically, at dvd quality h.264 will be fine.

darael · 3 Dec 2019 at 00:31

I bought a hard drive specifically for DVD and Blu-ray images. The 2TB drive holds over 400 hours and it's still got about 33% free, when I last looked.

I don't image my disks and sell them. I do it because it's far quicker than ripping all the discs if I decide to re-encode with Handbrake for whatever reason.

Orcvader · 3 Dec 2019 at 15:39

If space is important, set Handbrake to use h.265, on default it uses h.254. Should save a good bit of space on your drive.

Disco_P · 4 Dec 2019 at 16:34

I am gonna give advice on the premise that you realise that backing up your DVD collection is not the most legal thing to do and therefore actual keep the physical disks.

I use vidcoder for my video conversion needs as it is built on top of handbrake but I prefer the UI and it includes the option to encode a preview and view it. I'd decrypt and rip a DVD to a HDD, then play around with vidcoder settings. Start with H.265 MKV 576p25 preset, go to the video encoding tab change framerate same as source (allow variable framerate), constant quality 26 and medium preset. I don't know anything about audio encoding as I always just allow for passthrough, maybe you know more or someone else can advise.

Encode a preview and check quality, you can reduce filesize by increasing the constant quality number, increase quality by decreasing the quality number. Higher constant quality numbers also increase encoding time (I do all mine overnight/whilst out so don't care how long things take but also found that quality improvement from slower presets is negligible to me)