Ripping formats?

[ochoops]

Totally new to this so excuse the elementary question.

I recently purchased PavTube to rip my home Blu-rays and DVD's. I also downloaded Plex and created a Plex server, added the app to my Roku and think it's fantastic. I'm in movie nirvana!

What is the best format to preserve video quality while keeping the file size as small as possible? I've tried MKV but it creates 30GB files. I've tried 'iPad' MP4 format but it's not as good quality as the original but the file sizes are reasonable (< 3GB).

Suggestions?

Thanks!

Oscar

[redwudz]

I prefer MKV. But I use AnyDVD HD to rip the entire Blu-ray to one of my hard drives, then process it with RipBot to MKV/H.264/AC3 for a file size of about 8GB.
30GB sounds like the actual size of a movie file on a BD. If you want to reduce the file size, you have to re-encode and that does take a while, about three hours with my PC.


Most any encoder should give you a choice of file size. Just find the size and quality that suits you and use that.


And welcome to our forums.

[Hoser Rob]

Mkv and mp4 actually have nothing to do with the file size per se. They're not formats, they're containers. Ie. a sort of file header information that media software uses to tell which codec to use.

h.264 is the best format in terms of quality v. file size. It also has the most encoding options, which can greatly increase quality, encoding time, and difficulty for the user.

I'd suggest h.264 high profile and quality based (or crf) encoding. Crf doesn't let you exactly control file size but it works about as well as 2 pass, in a much more reasonable time.