Building a shared household media repository -- wondering about file sizes

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#1

Hey all,

I’m in the process of transferring all of the TV shows that I own on DVD to a networked Drobo so that they can be accessed from any of the TVs in the house (via Mediaportal). However, I’m really wavering in terms of deciding on quality/filesize, so I thought I’d check in with fellow HTPC geeks for insight.

Right now, I’m ripping episodes straight into mkv containers using MakeMKV. However, this doesn’t do any transcoding, and uses the original compression of the DVDs. That means file sizes are all over the place. For example, sitcom DVDs that contain ~6 episodes per disk come out to around 650 megs per episode. But a show that contains two episodes (e.g. an HBO series) spits out 3.5 gig files. Obviously, these latter shows are longer, but only by a factor of two, so that alone doesn’t account for the size differential.

So, I know I need to use something like handbrake to transcode the files, keeping the mkv wrapper but encoding with something a bit more efficient like H.264. For those that have done this, what file sizes do you typically end up with for hour (i.e. 42 minute) episodes that aren’t noticeably lower quality than the DVD source?

Thanks!

#2

I may not be the best judge of quality (Other than in stores I’ve never even seen a blu-ray movie) but I use the default “high profile” setting in Handbrake. A 2-hour movie tends to be about 1.5 gig, and a 45-minute TV show is generally about 500 meg. I watch these all the time on my 46 inch TV and they look fantastic (to me).

It rips H.264 in an m4v wrapper, though honestly I don’t know what that means :slight_smile: But anyway, I’d suggest ripping your favorite movie with Handbrake High Profile and see if it works for you.

#3

Awesome, thanks for the info!

I ended up transcoding an episode of Farscape that had a high degree of visual variation (e.g. fast paced space stuff, static conversational stuff etc.) twice: once at the “Normal” preset with an RF value of 20, and once at the “High Profile” preset with the RF manually bumped to 19. The size differential ended up only being about 200 megs (700 vs. 500), and there was a noticeable quality bump on my 50" plasma. For the slower-paced scenes with less camera movement, they were reasonably comparable. When you had really noisy backgrounds, though, with a lot of stuff moving around quickly, the High Profile transcode seemed to do better.