So many Handbrake settings, not enough time to try them out

[smitbret]

So, I've just decided to rip my Top 25 or so Blu-Rays and put them on my media server for streaming playback on my PS3 in their full Blu-Ray glory. I've read all of the arguments about compression and perception of quality and generally I agree with the "Good Enough" mentality, but for these films I want a transparent copy. I am ripping only the movie to my HDD using tsMuxer and then loading the .m2ts into Handbrake.

One particular thing keeps cropping up:

Shadows are moving. More particularly, when there is a stationary scene with little action and the camera doesn't move, the stationary shadows have blocking that "adjusts" or moves around during the course of the scene like a little black blob that is constantly changing shape.

With the movie "Heat", I originally just tried High Profile with a CRF of 22 and left the resolution at 1080p. If I remember correctly, it took a bit under 3 hours, gave me a file that was slightly smaller than 8GB and was utter crap. I cranked the CRF up to 16, which took much longer but gave much better results except for the moving shadows problem. So I Googled "Best Quality Handbrake settings for BR" and used this list to derive my new settings:

String B-frames = 8
b-adapt = 2
direct = auto
me = umh
merange = 24
partitions = all
rc-lookahead = 60
ref = 16
subme = 10
trellis = 2
(I know many of these don't transfer over directly to v0.9.5, so I made the adjustments that seemed to fit)
Then set the CRF for 12

The resulting .m2ts file was just a bit larger than the original .m2ts at 33GB which doesn't bother me because the result was perfect. The problem is that it took nearly 24 hours to do it.

So, I'm wondering which settings that I adjusted are pointless and only added to my encode time? Like I said the 2nd encode looked really good, except for the shadow issue and it was less than half as large as the 3rd one. I'm convinced that a 12-15GB file should be transparent to the original, but with the settings I have, I can't get there. Is there some kind of online tutorial about x264 encoding that I could try to get some info from or does anyone have a quick and easy answer about how to fix the shadows without setting the quality so high?

[aedipuss]

you could give vidcoder a try. it's a frontend for handbrake and is a bit easier. once you get the settings to your liking make a preset you can reuse. it also does very well queuing up multiple encodes.

[smitbret]

I'm ripping Blu-Rays to my HDD for streaming playback on my PS3. I use tsMuxer/AnyDVD to rip the movie only without any kind of re encoding. I want the absolute best quality for several of these, thinking 'transparent to the original Blu-Ray'. These uncompressed rips are fine (size isn't an issue) unless the video codec is VC-1 or there are forced subs which aren't supported by the PS3. In these cases I have to re-encode the VC-1 to x264 and/or burn in the subs. I have been using Handbrakes High Profile setting and using a CRF of 18, but the videos have the aforementioned shape-shifting, shadow blobs. Anytime the camera stops moving and there is a shadow or darker portion of the screen for more than just a brief moment, it blocks up and the blocks shift around like a pulsing blob.

I was able to get the movie 'Heat' to clean up, but I had to use some extreme settings that I picked up off the internet and set the CRF to 12 and the result was about 1GB larger than the original .m2ts file @ 33GB. It took 24 hours to encode with my Phenom IIx4. At that rate, it'll take me 6 months to get the 30 or so BR discs onto my HDD. If that's what it takes, I will do it, but I'd rather get that down to 8-10 hours or better. Unfortunately, all of the x264 guides that I can find don't really explain what the settings do on a level that I understand.

Which Handbrake settings help clean this up and still keep the encode time to a reasonable level?

[Baldrick]

One similar thread is enough. I merged your threads.