Whats the best sizes for ripping blu-ray to mkv

[adamf154]

I have just started ripping blu-ray and encoding them to mkv, so i was wondering what the best sizes would be for films and tv episodes at the 1080 size.

Or maybe how many gb per hour, i have ripped the spiderman trilogy at 4.3gb and dont really see much difference, i have noticed some films coming in at 2 - 3 gb then others at 7 - 8 gb and i have seen tv programes (50 mins) ranging from 1.45 gb to 3 gb, so basically just looking for some guidance to sizes so i can get great quality rips.

I am using handbrake if the film is just one file and shrinking it down, if the file is more than 1 i am using make mvk then using handbrake, cuts out the time of make mkv.

Thanks in advance for any help

[redwudz]

Most BD>MKV main movie conversions I do with RipBot are at ~8GB filesize, partially so I can back the MKV up to DL DVD discs in case of hard drive failure. I notice quite a bit of quality loss at 4GB filesize, but that would depend on what you are viewing it on. I have a fairly large video projection screen.

[adamf154]

I have a 32" at the moment but ill be upgrading that in the near future, im undecided if it want to go with 4,8,16 or whatever the blu-ray size is and just make mkv it at that, its alot quicker than using handbrake, it would be upto an hour to use make mkv but upto 8 hours to convert it to 8gb using handbrake

[fritzi93]

Whatever compromise you arrive at, it is contingent on a number of factors:

1) Source material: its quality, run time, how compressible it is (action vs talking heads), etc.

2) Your equipment: Size of HDTV; and whether you have a sound system that makes it worth keeping DTS-MA and/or TrueHD audio (this bears on file size), etc.

2) How critical an eye you have. If you think a Spiderman movie of BD5 size is okay, that affects your answer. And are you at all concerned about hard drive space?

Blah blah, okay then. Here's a short answer: The author of AVCHDCoder, for one, seems to think a bitrate of ~4,500 kbps is minimum acceptable for a commercial movie. I think that's about as good as any other rule of thumb. That's movie-only of about 1 hr 55 minutes on a BD5, more or less, assuming you re-encode the audio to 448 kbps AC3. More than that, or if you keep high bitrate audio, one should probably use BD9.

I find the above acceptable for AVCHDs displayed on a 47" LCD. Make no mistake, though, if I look hard I can tell the difference on BD5, usually by the banding/posterization in dim scenes, if nothing else.

Try it a couple of ways and compare. Good luck.

[adamf154]

Thanks for the info, im not sure i need true hd audio as long as i can hear the background noise and all the talking at the same level. i have watched films and the talking is way below a decent standard that u have to put the sound up and every explosion or background noise is doubled and very loud. I think i could only tell if there is a large difference if i watched the film but i flick through the whole movie looking for anything unusal, u can usually notice the difference on dark scenes like you said, i have 5 hard drives and i am away to get another one for my films which will be 2tb, so hard drive space isn't an issue.

I have heard that 2- 3 gb per hour is standard for most blu-ray, but i think i will work it out on a film to film basis, some films like say the star wars films you would want to keep at a high standard but films like the final destination 4 i have is ok at 3 - 4 gb cause its only 80 mins, i will be experimenting on different sizes, i have done the spiderman Trilogy at about 4.3gb, so might try it at 10 or maybe i will just half the size of each film i get and do it that way.