Mac - Handbrake: all x264 filters off? - MKV

[heinza]

Hi all,
I've been having problems playing an MKV file with DTS sound on my PopcornHour A-210 (video stutters).
I've tried remuxing it with the latest version of MKVmerge, but no improvement.
I decided to recode the entire video with Handbrake latest version, using MKV as a container and x264 as video codec, audio = DTS passthrough, to see if it's any help.
The movie in question is "Ju-On: The Grudge 1", which has an opening scene that is purposely grainy.
I've set the same video bitrate in Handbrake as the original file, as found in MediaInfo, and added "no-deblock" or "no-deblock=1" to the x264 filters in the Advanced tab. Despite all this, when I run a live preview, the picture is altered, i.e. the graininess is not preserved as I would have expected, and it is more blocky than the original. (see attached snapshots)
The entire filters string is:
ref=2:bframes=2:subq=6:mixed-refs=0:weightb=0:8x8dct=0:trellis=0:no-deblock=1
In the HandBrake Picture Setting, all filters are turned off too.
Broadly speaking, I've found the filters to be annoyingly "intrusive", as I've been looking for a way to simply keep the original video 'as is' when converting, but I can't seem to find a way to do so.
Am I missing something or is it just the way it is?
Appreciate any help!
Thanks!

[heinza]

EDIT:
Turned out to be the "target size" and "average bitrate" methods to be inaccurate in live previewing and/or handling compression in general.
No apparent issues in Live Preview using Constant Quality.
The only annoying thing is the unpredictability of the final file size with this method.