MKV vs MP4 for SD DVD Server

[jeby1980]

I have a 4TB synology NAS, and I would like to finally digitize my 1000+ SD DVD library onto a Plex server. It will be utilized in-house and remotely by the family. In some trial runs, I feel like that the quality of ripping with MakeMKV and compressing further to a mp4 via handbrake provided great results, yielding about 2.0GB per movie, and no problems streaming 4 threads simultaneously.

If I left it as-ripped, its obviously in mpg2 around 5GB per movie, and honestly I'm not seeing the quality difference that I notice a lot of the internet talks about. For those of you who have gone through this, is there a point where you really notice quality degradation when going with mp4? Am just wanting to make sure i'm not missing something here. I'm viewing on a 48" LED screen, and obviously they're SD to begin with so we're not expecting HD quality....

[netmask56]

I think its a combination of "the eye pf the beholder"and the quality of the equipment. For me my typical rips are around the 20GB range and 4K mostly, although I do have some really very old DVD's and even a few VCD's but I prefer to rip at the highest possible resolution both video and audio. So you need to be the judge to set the standard that suits you and your families need.

[jeby1980]

Holy cow! 20GB per movie is impressive. You must own stock in Western Digital I am curious how you store and back up so much data.

A dual 4TB NAS HDD running in RAID1 alone runs $325, the higher capacity drives are insanely expensive and i dont think drive prices have come down in a long time now..

[zing269]

You don't say which codec you are using for encoding so this may not be useful but with H264 I find a crf value of 18 to be good.

[jeby1980]

Yup, that is exactly what I'm using. and framerate same as source.