Best compression while maintaining quality

[dace99]

I was just curious what programs (Handbrake, VidEncoder, etc) and settings MakeMKV users are using to compress MKV files. I'm especially interested in learning what compression settings people are using for 1080p Blu-ray conversions. I'm OK with sacrificing some quality to save 20GB of disk space, but what are some recommendations that would allow me to maintain high video quality and achieve a reasonable file size?

[dcoke22]

Lately, I've been using Don Melton's Other Video Transcoding to turn 1080p blu-rays into 10-bit HEVCs.

[Ezatoka]

Unlike my older Video Transcoding project, the other-transcode tool in this package automatically selects a platform-specific hardware video encoder rather than relying on a slower software encoder.

Did something change with hardware encoding? Because otherwise it will be worse than software encoded I think. Faster, but worse quality.

[Billycar11]

Unlike my older Video Transcoding project, the other-transcode tool in this package automatically selects a platform-specific hardware video encoder rather than relying on a slower software encoder.

Did something change with hardware encoding? Because otherwise it will be worse than software encoded I think. Faster, but worse quality.

Yeah Nvidia's hardware encoder from Turing or RTX 20xx series
Has improved quality to be on par with CPU encoding compared to older hardware encoders.
https://youtu.be/ccoOGfX9qxg

[wmcclain]

It is important to run your own experiments, test different parameters to see what differences you can detect.

Also be aware that changes that are not visible on one display may become more so on a different one.

That said, this is what I use with command-line Handbrake:

For Blu-ray, --preset="Very Fast 1080p30" -q 20

For DVD, --preset="Fast 1080p30" -q 18

Lower "q" is higher quality and DVD needs more help.

My current LG OLED is more sensitive than my previous Samsung LCD and I can sometimes see contouring on low-contrast backgrounds. I live with it. To be fair you sometimes see it in the original source, too.

The space savings are variable; it depends on the master of the source.