Is Rez or Bits More Important?

[Pareto Optimal]

Is it better to rip to a higher rez with lower Bit Rate and Bits per Pixel or to lower the rez to have a higher Bit Rate and Bits per Pixel?
The Bits per Pixel doesn't change much, very little actually, but the Bit Rate changes considerably.

I'm using DVDFab. When I go to the setup/configure window, it's already chosen a rez or maybe it's set to the rez I used last.
If I choose a higher or lower rez, I noticed the Bit Rate and Bits per Pixel goes up and down. The output file created, of course, goes up and down greatly.
The resolution choices aren't always the same for every disc.

Should I select the rez that has the highest Bit Rate and Bits per Pixel which usually seems to be 640 or should I set a higher rez with lower Bit Rate and Bits per Pixel?
Can I, should I, adjust the Bit Rate manually by the slide bar for any rez if that is possible? Should I type in some perfect Bits per Pixel number in that box? If so, what is a good Bit Rate and Bits per pixel?

Does DVDFab choose the best rez for that disc or does it just choose what I used the last time or does it choose one particular rez all the time by default?

By the way, I noticed that DVDFab sometimes lists Bits per Pixel as 0.1 and sometimes as 0.10 as if they're two different numbers instead of the same one tenth of one bit. I thought maybe the creators of DVDFab meant 0.1 to be one and 0.10 to be ten but it appears that the slide bar for Bit Rate goes up further for 0.1 instead of 0.10. That may just be an optical illusion.

[Cornucopia]

My opinion: You need to decide what is important to you.

What you are doing is NOT just ripping, it is ripping AND converting. If you were just ripping, you would have a VOB, or series of vobs, or an MPG2 (if taken from DVD) and it would be equal in size to the source. A similar process would happen with Bluray.

When converting, you can convert to whatever you want. What do you want?...

Understand that when converting, you basically will never get it better than your source (with certain rare exceptions). Even if you use higher bitrate or more efficient codec on the copy.

Understand also that the higher your video's resolution, the higher the bitrate needs to be, IN ORDER TO MAINTAIN COMPARABLE QUALITY. This is not linear, however, and differs based on settings, codec & implementation, and content itself.
Bits per pixel is ok as an indicator as far as it goes, but it doesn't come close to telling the whole story.
You could have an h264 with no B frames, and a corresponding h265 with many B frames, both 1st gen copies of the original with good settings, and the h264 could have 1 or 2 orders of magnitude higher bpp than the h265, yet still have the h265 give better quality, because of the efficiencies of B frames and the improved efficiency of h265 encoding over h264.

If you choose higher rez without accompanyingly higher bitrate, you will have your higher detail, but you will also have much more artifacts which can "ruin" the detail.
If you go for lower rez, and keep decent bitrate, you would have fuzzier or blockier/blurrier details, but much less artifacts (the remaining detail will be truer).

You should figure out the format that works best with your devices, and calculate the highest bitrates that you can afford with that format, then work backwards and decide which rez gives you the most acceptable (and most acceptable type of) quality for that bitrate.

(Or you could just do crf encoding and live with whatever bitrate the acceptable quality choice gives you, but it did seem you are more focused on bitrate.)

Scott

[Pareto Optimal]

Thank you for the help, Scott. I'm not really focused on any one thing. I'm listing what I've observed in my ripper's default settings. I get that as one goes down the other two go up. However, there are times when that doesn't hold true. In some cases reducing rez one more step doesn't have a corresponding increase in the other two settings. It's better to go up one step in rez for the better bit rate and bits per pixel. The differences in bits per pixel are negligible.

I was wondering if there was a preferred setting for any one of the settings that I should set them to manually. And perhaps a setting I should not go below. If there are ideal settings, I could manually set a rez and override the default settings for that rez to preferred settings someone could recommend rather than use the defaults.

All the settings I'm using are DVDFab defaults. I choose the rez and sets the bit settings for that rez. I could manually adjust the bit settings if someone recommended preferable settings. I want whichever rez, Bit Rate and Bits per Pixel delivers decent quality at a decent size.

I've made a number of rips I intended to do at a rez of 720 but found the other two settings went up if I lowered it to 640. So, I set it to 640. I thought that was preferable to have better quality of lines rather than more lines. What do you think?

The only artifacts of sorts I've experienced have occurred at 720, 640 and 480 at the same place in the rip the first time I play it but when I play it back at the same place, it's not there again.

I know I'm not just ripping. I'm converting too. Oddly some rips/conversions are short and others take a long time. Some take several hours. It seems if I have many tabs open in my browser, the rips/conversions take longer. If I close tabs it goes faster. If I'm not actively doing anything on the Internet, it goes faster.

I chose MKV because it seems to be popular and compatible with everything and may be smaller in size to other formats. It may have more flexibility in that I can assign tags to it. A friend of mine is against anything MS. I've looked around online and it seems most people use H264 and MP4 for wide use across old devices. MKV is also widely used and more advanced users who all their players are compatible with H265 use H265.

[Cornucopia]

I've told you what I think.

There is NO one-size-fits-all. Because much is dependent upon the complexity (both spatial & temporal) of the content itself.

However, just as I said you cannot improve on the original, quality-wise, via bitrate, you also cannot increase quality by increasing resolution: you end up using interpolated data to generate those extra pixels, so not only is there no real, new, unique information, but you would be needing to up the bitrate just to accommodate the extra pixels. AND you are adding a lossy encoding generation.

Think of water flowing downhill from the top of a mountain. It never gets higher than that, just stays the same or (more likely) lower. Sometimes much lower.

Better to only uprez when needing to edit in concert with already natively higher rez material (and then you should encode losslessly), or not uprez at all and let your final player or tv do the uprezzing during playback.

Also, IIWY, I'd not focus on bpp further until you understand all that factors into that, and how it interacts with everyyhing else.

Scott

[lordsmurf]

Bits matter most.
Adequate bitrate for the resolution and content.

[Pareto Optimal]

Thanks for the info and help Scott and lordsmurf.

I mistakenly thought the higher bits at lower rez meant I was getting better quality of what was on the disc. That was stupid on my part. I just jumped to the conclusion that more was better. I thought I could either have more lines of less quality or less lines but of better quality. I can't improve on the source. If DVDFab chooses the correct bits for the native rez, that's the best rez to go with at the bits it chooses. The bits going up when I lower the rez isn't making it better. It must be that it needs more bits to make it look as good or almost as good as it would look at the recommended, higher rez with less bits.

I also thought with DVDs of ancient B&W movies and TV that DVDFab may have chosen the wrong rez since it's on a DVD. I thought that old material may be native 640 or less.
I also thought those old B&W shows may benefit from more bits to make what's on the source look clearer and richer.
I suppose if it's on a 720 DVD and DVDFab chooses 720 I should go with that and it's chosen bits unless file size is a higher priority for a special project.

Thank you very much.

[_Al_]

You are looking for some formula, but that does not exist.

Any formulas and rules certain bits per pixel formula, VBR 2pass are not predictable because there is no binding to original. Except more is better but you do not know where the base is.
The only think you can firmly grab onto is CRF and desired quality. If that gives you too much bitrate, go slowly down with resolution. But of course quality falls down stepping down each time.
Remember, using CRF, one movie, DVD is not decisive, you need 20 and more peaces to encode, different movies, videos, and that will start to give you some average per movie/per time. That is what is going to be on your hardisk, some theoretical average per movie.

[lordsmurf]

I mistakenly thought the higher bits at lower rez meant I was getting better quality of what was on the disc.
If DVDFab

That can be the case.
If you're "shrinking" the content (DVD recompress to smaller size, thus starting 720x of bitrate), then it may be very true.

[pandy]

judge by yourself - do some tests and check what is OK for you - at some point ultra high resolution with very high quantization may be OK when target display has significantly lower resolution. At some point you may go even to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oversampled_binary_image_sensor - same principle for video - however traditional codec design are not tailored for this.