I’m not sure what you were trying, but this works for me:
Never use hardware encoding. That is intended for real time transcoding. There are not many settings that work since it is just sending the file to the video card and letting it do its thing.
Slower is better. If you set the software encoder to very slow it will produce an output that is very high quality per megabyte. I generally don’t care if it takes twice as long to encode it as to watch it. I queue it up and let it run over night.
Choose the right codec. I like 10 bit HEVC, because I know it will work on the clients I play it from. When you rip a DVD using MakeMKV, the video will be MPEG-2, it was designed in the 1990’s and converting the file to a modern codec will save a lot of space. I don’t reencode 4K UHD rips much since I don’t want to mess with losing the hdr or other color features that I like in watching those files.
Audio tracks: I will rip out audio for languages I don’t speak, or desctiptive audio track, but go out of my way to label things like director commentaries. I don’t reencode the audio tracks at all, you won’t save much disk space by messing with them compared to the video tracks.
Be sure to use constant quality mode too. Set the RF to around 16-18 for SD video when using x264 or x265. The lower you set it, the higher the quality is.
I gave up encoding with handbrake. It looks much worse after the fact 99% of the time, no matter which settings I use.
De-telecine: default De-interlace detection: default De-interlace: decomb
Video encoding: x265 10bit (don’t use NVENC, Intel, or AMD hardware encode)
Preset: slow
Quality rate factor: 16
The above should be suitable for most DVDs and yields good results of 1/4 to 1/2 the size going from MPEG2 to HEVC.
I’m not sure what you were trying, but this works for me:
Never use hardware encoding. That is intended for real time transcoding. There are not many settings that work since it is just sending the file to the video card and letting it do its thing.
Slower is better. If you set the software encoder to very slow it will produce an output that is very high quality per megabyte. I generally don’t care if it takes twice as long to encode it as to watch it. I queue it up and let it run over night.
Choose the right codec. I like 10 bit HEVC, because I know it will work on the clients I play it from. When you rip a DVD using MakeMKV, the video will be MPEG-2, it was designed in the 1990’s and converting the file to a modern codec will save a lot of space. I don’t reencode 4K UHD rips much since I don’t want to mess with losing the hdr or other color features that I like in watching those files.
Audio tracks: I will rip out audio for languages I don’t speak, or desctiptive audio track, but go out of my way to label things like director commentaries. I don’t reencode the audio tracks at all, you won’t save much disk space by messing with them compared to the video tracks.
Be sure to use constant quality mode too. Set the RF to around 16-18 for SD video when using x264 or x265. The lower you set it, the higher the quality is.