How do i take my re-encoding to the next level?

[defeatedrebel]

I've been re-encoding TV shows for personal use for a few years, but i feel like i could get better results.

I've used Handbrake most of the time and have also tried out ffmpeg, and i can get a regular HDTV/WEB-DL to about half the size of the scenerelease, but any smaller than that and the quality just goes completely.

I found my sweetspot for re-encoding at RF 25 with passthru audio on slow speed, and that's pretty much all the settings i do before a re-encode, which i've been satisfied with so far. But i see groups like Mkvcage pushing the sizes down with no loss in quality compared to my re-encodes, and a general episode of a comedy show they re-encode is around 150 MB, but i can barely push below 300 MB without getting noticably bad quality.

Do i use some kind of supplement software to use together with Handbrake or how do i push the size down further without losing quality?

As i mentioned earlier, this is purely for personal use.

[Bernix]

Easiest thing you can do is to compare Mediainfo of your files and desired files. You can also in audio get 48kbps in stereo using HE-aac (nero, qaac and others) But it hardly save 80kbps. Just compare encoder settings in Mediainfo.
And when you are aiming at specific size, then is better use 2pass encoding of course.

[defeatedrebel]

Easiest thing you can do is to compare Mediainfo of your files and desired files. You can also in audio get 48kbps in stereo using HE-aac (nero, qaac and others) But it hardly save 80kbps. Just compare encoder settings in Mediainfo.
And when you are aiming at specific size, then is better use 2pass encoding of course.

I checked out Mediainfo and compared an episode that Mkvcage had re-encoded to the same episode i had re-encoded, and one thing i noticed was that it says that the writing application on Mkvcage's re-encode was mkvmerge while my writing application was Handbrake. Does this mean that they don't even use Handbrake? But i don't get how you can re-encode in mkvmerge? You mostly do small changes there.

[Bernix]

They most probably encoded it in command line and don't use any GUI. They just put it in mkv in mkvmerge or so. It is just my guess.