MKV mediainfo questions/advice

[CoopOwnz]

Hello all, I've just started learning about encoding my movies.
I have quite a large collection of movies imo (800+) that reside on one of my 2TB external HDs. I generally watch my movies with VLC media player on my 22" samsung monitor (1680x1050). With my knowledge so far I think my best bet is to encode my movies down to 2GB (mkv) using H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video format and MPEG-4 AAC-LC 5.1 audio. I realize this is very small for a blu-ray or hd-dvd source but on my monitor I can hardly tell a difference in quality.

So, I used rip bot which makes things very simple for a newbie like myself and produced a movie with the specs I mentioned above. I like to include a nfo file along with the movie that lists the detailed specs. Problem is while using MediaInfo software for the movie I just encoded the audio bitrate mode and bitrate is not listed and I don't understand why this is. I didn't have this problem with my last encode. Also, the video and audio stream sizes are not listed which wasn't hard to find out but still I'm curious as to why.

I greatly appreciate any help and if anyone has any advice/opinions on how I set-up my collection please let me know,
Thanks much!
-Coop

[redwudz]

2GB might be OK for DVDs, but at least 8GB would be a better choice for Blu-ray. Especially if you upgrade your display in the future. BDs need a bit more space. I'm not sure why MediaInfo doesn't show bitrates. It does for my RipBot files. I do use AC3 for audio with BDs. Maybe variable rate audio and video is the problem?

With DVDs, I just convert them to ISO and play with VLC. They take up about 8GB, but that's similar to my BD conversions to MKV. Less conversion, less quality loss. You can run your DVDs through DVD Shrink if you need to get rid of studio crap and extras and subs and languages you don't need. A lot faster than MKV conversion for DVD and not much bigger than 8GB most times. If you have plenty of HDD space, maybe a better choice than conversion for a DVD file.

But others may have better ideas.

And welcome to our forums.

[guns1inger]

It may depend on the version of mediainfo. I currently have version 0.7.29 installed and it shows the 'nominal bitrate' for H264 encoded mkv files. This appears to be an average video bitrate for the file.

[CoopOwnz]

@redwudz - Thanks 4 the warm welcome =D & advice.
@guns1inger - I'm using the most recent version, 0.7.35.

I'm working with ~4.5 TB of HDD space so if I use 8GB encodes thats just not enough. With the collection I've got going atm I would probably need upwards of 6-7TB + another 1.5TB for my music, shows, progs, etc.. That makes me wonder what those of you with 8GB movie collections are working with in terms of HDD space...?
I'm also curious whether a DVD encoded to 2GB will have a noticeable quality difference from a Blu-ray encoded to 2GB. I've seen plenty of people encoding Blu-rays down to under 2GB (sometimes even 700MB, haha). Is there even a purpose in that supposing you have both a DVD and Blu-ray copy?

As for the MediaInfo I realized that my previous encode which showed the audio bitrate & streamsize was 3GB and used AC3 audio whereas my most recent encode (2GB) used AAC and did not show bitrate/streamsize. So I assume that is the reason although I still would like to be able to view that movies audio bitrate if anyone knows another way. This might sound stupid but with one of those bitrate calculators I've seen around could I find it out that way?

Also, those of you who collect .mkv's what do you think about building the movies case or poster art directly in the container? What about the movies details/specs? I ask this because I like to have a png image of the case and a nfo file with all the details in the same folder with the movie. I was thinking it might be nice to just have all of these things in one file.