[turbinez]

I am planning to rip and encode all my dvds soon using handbrake on the mac. what settings do you guys suggest thats optimal as far as quality/filesize?

I notice a lot of movies online are 700mb DIVX files. However is h.264 better? I mean smaller file size and higher quality? If so I will go that route instead of divx. What do you guys think?

[Maverik]

I use the "AppleTV"-preset and change the bitrate to about 2000kbit. I think that look great.

[turbinez]

I would like to transfer some of my DVD collection to xbmc... I am using mactheripper and handbrake. What settings do you guys use for both to get the best of both worlds in terms of decent size and decent quality.

what codec do you use? mpeg 4 (ffmpeg), mpeg 4 (xvid), h264, etc...

[turbinez]

i am trying to match closely to aXxo rips, all his rips are usually 700mb files and they look pretty good on my HDTV...

[dan1son]

Handbrake has a filesize setting which finds the bitrate that makes it fit to a file. Usually used for fitting a movie onto a CD.

However, this quality is no where near the original DVD. The AppleTV preset, while larger, is a really darn good file. Not only picture quality, but it contains the Dolby Digital audio track as well.

To find out your other files exact settings you can use "MediaInfo" which will tell you the encoder used, bitrate, audio track format, etc. Give you a pretty good idea of his settings. Just keep in mind using the same bitrate could cause larger files if the video is longer.

[dan1son]

Check this thread on the handbrake forum.
http://forum.handbrake.fr/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=7718

Due to some oddities in XBMC, in order to get smooth playback you will need to set a framerate to something other than "same as source." Usually handbrake will scan the movie and give you a guess as to the framerate of the "title." You can then set the framerate to that setting and everything should be smooth.

The "same as source" setting is smooth enough for most people, so ymmv, but I find it unacceptably choppy.

The idea of the AppleTV preset is to give a good size and quality. I usually use it and simply set a framerate. The AppleTV preset does include the 5.1 passthrough track, so if you don't need that you can save a good chunk of data.