How much can a Blu-Ray movie be compressed before noticeable quality loss?

[Rampage Jackson]

I want to rip my Blu Ray collection for a HTPC (xbmc) to be played on a 52 inch LCD, how much can it be compressed (just the Movie) without a lot of quality loss? Would shrinking it to 10Gb or 15Gb be to much?

Also on average how large is just the movie part of a Blu-ray that is not compressed 1:1? 30GB?

I just want to get an idea how many movies I can store on about a 4TB or 6TB NAS.

[hech54]

1) There WILL be quality loss in recompression.
2) "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" - unanswerable question.

[Rampage Jackson]

1) There WILL be quality loss in recompression.
2) "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" - unanswerable question.

How large would a 1:1 rip of just the movie be on average, around 30GB?

[edDV]

1) There WILL be quality loss in recompression.
2) "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" - unanswerable question.

How large would a 1:1 rip of just the movie be on average, around 30GB?

18-30GB typ.

If your 52" TV is 1920x1080 with a good processing engine, you will see loss with any re-encode.

If the TV is 1366x768 and the source is 24p, you could get away with downsize/recode at 1/3 to 1/2 the bitrate (filesize).

If you can accept typical DTV subchannel quality, 1366x768 8 Mb/s h.264 (~1/3 file size) might be acceptable to you. It wouldn't be for me.

Now what if you convert all this (weeks of work), then decide to upgrade your TV?

[Rampage Jackson]

1) There WILL be quality loss in recompression.
2) "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" - unanswerable question.

How large would a 1:1 rip of just the movie be on average, around 30GB?

18-30GB typ.

If your 52" TV is 1920x1080 with a good processing engine, you will see loss with any re-encode.

If the TV is 1366x768 and the source is 24p, you could get away with downsize/recode at 1/3 to 1/2 the bitrate (filesize).

If you can accept typical DTV subchannel quality, 1366x768 8 Mb/s h.264 (~1/3 file size) might be acceptable to you. It wouldn't be for me.

Now what if you convert all this (weeks of work), then decide to upgrade your TV?

Actually I was thinking of getting this

http://www.futureshop.ca/en-CA/product/lg-electronics-lg-50-1080p-plasma-hdtv-50pv450-...353ed492d7en02

I imagine just ripping the movie would take less time then ripping and compressing it into a smaller file?? Not worth the time and effort?

[edDV]

A recode takes time (depending on computer speed) and lowers quality. With 2TB drives down to about $70, not worth the effort. A 2TB drive will hold ~65 Blu-Ray movies.

[chicken264]

Converting to 50" tv with less lot of quality means require high quality setting which may result lot of work and time.

keeping the original is better.

[cal_tony]

Of course I agree with edDV and HECH54.

The only thing I might add is that even in most original BRs you can see scenes that are not optimal quality.

And without having the technical expertise of the 2 above, I would imagine that those scenes that are already weak would be the first to show deterioration even with just a minimal reduction in size.

As said above, 2tb drives can be had for less than $70.


Tony

[redwudz]

I agree with most all of the above, but I re-encode my BDs down to about 8GB using RipBot to MKV format. (H.264, AC3 640K 5.1) I don't have unlimited HDD space. And I want to back up the re-encodes to optical media. Three re-encodes fit nicely on a BD-R disc. I have had HDD failures, so this preserves the re-encodes.

The re-encodes look great to me on my video projector screen, much better than a DVD. The downside is it takes about four hours to process each BD>MKV. And that is the main movie only. This is done on the PC in my 'Computer Details', 3.5Ghz, six core AMD. When I used a 3.5Ghz quad core CPU, it took about five hours.

If I upped the re-encode size to about 10Gb to 15Gb, I think it would be hard to tell apart from the original quality. but my system works well enough for me. I run the re-encodes overnight, so time is not really an issue.

Just another option.

[Kerry56]

I burn to single layer blu ray disks. The ~23gb output (main movie only) are very hard for me to tell from the originals. Of course, many of those have no compression for main movie only, but even the largest main movie I have done is about 32-35gb to start, and I can't see the difference when playing back. BD Rebuilder and X264 do a darn good job at this.

But the largest screen I have access to is 42" 1080p.

Hech54 hit it on the nose in the first reply you know....everyone has different standards of what is acceptable.

[jman98]

For what it's worth, I have the same set up (42" 1080p HDTV) and experience as Kerry56. Single layer backups by BD Rebuilder are fine by me.

[jagabo]

Forget bitrates. Perform a few constant quality encodes with different CRF values and see what you can live with. Then encode all your videos at that CRF value.

[Rampage Jackson]

Thanks, I don't think I will bother trying to shrink them. I see a lot of guides on here but what do you guys recommend the best way to rip just the movie part 1:1? Does AnyDVD HD do it? all I need?

BTW thanks for all your help!

[jagabo]

For example, I just encoded a 103 minute, 1920x816 (black borders cropped away), 23.976 fps, Blu-ray rip in 65 minutes using the following x264 command line:

x264.exe --preset=veryfast --crf 18 --ref 3 --bframes 2 --keyint 100 --sar 1:1 --output %1.mkv %1

A 20 GB source was reduced to about 5 GB and pretty much indistinguishable from the original at normal playback speed. If you stop and look at enlarged stills you can see a little loss of film grain, and occasionally a little roughness on the edges of fast moving objects. At CRF 15 the result was about 8 GB and retained most of the grain (same encoding time). This was on a quad core i5 2600K at stock speed.

[ricoman]

With all due respect to EdDV and to go further than Hech54, both who are more knowledgeable on the technical end than I, as Hech said, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." It's all relative, I have a 60" Sony and I regularly watch BD movie only discs on a BD25 disc and I can not tell the difference from the original. Hell, if it's a mediocre movie and I don't want to waste a BD25 disc I will burn it to a BD9 (regular DL) disc and can barely tell the difference, maybe the slightest pixelization on an action scene or shiny beach scene, that's it. So, if you want to save a bunch of movies on a TB drive, don't hesitate to use BDRebuilder and compress to BD25 of even BD9 for a drama where most scenes are inside. Hell, I've even compressed a couple to BD5 to try it and they come out much better than a standard DVD. So, as I said, it's all relative to what you can accept. Try a couple and see if you can see a difference. I often watch regular standard DVDs and after a minute or two, you don't really think about the difference.

[Kerry56]

Thanks, I don't think I will bother trying to shrink them. I see a lot of guides on here but what do you guys recommend the best way to rip just the movie part 1:1? Does AnyDVD HD do it? all I need?

BTW thanks for all your help!

You can use AnyDVD HD in the background to break encryption and get the main movie using ClownBD. Set ClownBD to output as Blu ray. Clown BD is free, but AnyDVD HD is rather expensive these days.

This is not the process I use. I always use the built in ripper within AnyDVD HD to rip everything to the hard drive first before working with it, either to compress or take out the main movie.

[fritzi93]

Of course, objectively there must be quality loss with a re-encode. That said, I agree entirely with ricoman.

After all, the original question was about "noticeable" quality loss.

So how good is the display? How discerning are you?

On my 47" 1080p LCD (fairly well-calibrated), I have a very hard time distinguishing an original Blu-Ray from a BD9 movie-only, downconverted AC3 audio re-encode. My wife can't tell the difference, and I would guess most of the general public couldn't either. As to BD25 movie-only (which is my preferred method), many movies will fit without re-encoding. As to the ones that do require it, I defy anyone to say they can see any quality loss on a consumer HDTV at 60" size or less. (Except maybe pros like edDV).

So there's no absolute answer. Yeah, eye of the beholder about covers it.

[edDV]

My job is to see the difference so my eyes are spoiled. Y'all figure it out for yourselves.

[Rampage Jackson]

Thanks, I don't think I will bother trying to shrink them. I see a lot of guides on here but what do you guys recommend the best way to rip just the movie part 1:1? Does AnyDVD HD do it? all I need?

BTW thanks for all your help!

You can use AnyDVD HD in the background to break encryption and get the main movie using ClownBD. Set ClownBD to output as Blu ray. Clown BD is free, but AnyDVD HD is rather expensive these days.

This is not the process I use. I always use the built in ripper within AnyDVD HD to rip everything to the hard drive first before working with it, either to compress or take out the main movie.

Thanks, what is your method for compressing if you don't mind me asking.

[gatorproof]

I use and have for years DVDFAB for my ripping software. Until just lately we only ripped HD movies because of the BD disc cost which I am guessing you are trying to avoid my ripping to HHD. You will be happy to know that you can now buy blank 22.5Gb blanks discs for a buck a piece. When using DVDFAB and ripping to fit on 22.5GB disc, you can watch movies on an 8000 series Samsung 3D plasma with no distensible loss.Their is actually a meter in the software that tells you what the compression loss is.
Now since DVDFAB allows you to rip BD and convert on the same motion to H.264 or AVI and so on. I do that to watch on my tablet or my Galaxy Note cell phone. If you watch on a 10.1 tablet with 149ppi IPS panel, they show quit well.They also show well on my Galaxy Note 5.3 286ppi display of this unit even though the res. is so high the screen is smaller. So screen lets you get away with a lot.
I have plugged in my 10.1 tablet by HDMI into the 60" Samsung and played movies and they with some TV settings tweeking come out fair. But not worth the effect just to do that.
So, you can burn to your HHDs but I would suggest that you buy the 100 BD discs for 100 bucks and keep your collection on hard disc for the furture (HHDS quit spinning at some point and then you have nothing).Hope this helps. We have over a 1000 movies on DVD and BD. But of course the are backups in case our master copies get damaged. (;>{}).