On the video tab, granted there's a bit more to understand but here's my preferred settings: On the audio tab, you already know enough about audio to choose wisely - selecting AAC with 320kbps is the most playback-compatible with your Mac (and with AppleTV if you ever get one to make it easier to stream from your Mac to your tv). Keep in mind I'm doing this on a Mac Mini with an external Samsung BD drive.Ĭlick to expand.Handbrake is really quite easy. Just a lot of stuff taking up space (like those multi-DVD Stones box sets) that I haven't watched in years, but, y'know, might want to randomly put on someday in the distant future for some reason.Īny info/advice/tips would be great. Almost all of it is music-related, if that would make a difference in which format/process to use. I know Handbrake gives you all kinds of options, and they're far more overwhelming than audio encoders. I'm wondering if video encoding quality has developed a bit since I was in college 15 years ago. I don't know much about video, never really needed to until now, but I'm guessing a few of you probably have more experience with this.

(For example, two hours of Pearl Jam's Touring Band 2000 is almost a 5 GB. I know I can use MakeMKV to basically extract the exact video/audio from the file, but I'm wondering if there isn't a more space-efficient version of this.

I'm looking for a balance between size and quality, and generally looking only to extract the main feature into one file, not just back everything up as massive. I tried to find a thread discussing this specifically, but couldn't find any recent ones, if I missed it, I sincerely apologize. I've ripped things in the past for various purposes, but never really for full-quality archiving on a server until now. So now that I've got my 5.1 FLAC issues solved (thanks to all that commented in that thread last month), the next step is to find a good answer for actual video DVD's.

Handbrake and makemkv