www.makemkv.com

Hi. I'm ripping some DVDs that I own, just to enjoy watching series episodes via Plex. I did this in the beginning with handbrake and lidvdcss. But for one series it didn't work. So I started to rip the series with makeMKV and then convert it with handbrake (to h264 mp4). The result, however, is frustrating. For some films, the MKV quality is already so bad that I can't read the text in the credits. Does anyone have a tip on how to get good quality to rip my series episodes decently? If it makes a difference, I use a MacBook Air with M1 chip. Thank you.

MakeMKV is going to rip what's on the disk. That would be the "highest quality" the disk is capable of displaying.

Converting the file using handbrake depends entirely upon the settings used in handbrake. I typically use a "High MKV" setting, based upon the default h264 MKV settings in handbrake, but with all audio turned on. If that generates "bad video", it's because something was screwy with the video.

Text in the credits should pass through fairly well, assuming it was readable in the original. Some DVDs ignore on-screen text, though.

In some circles I know people don't bother using Handbrake on things ripped from DVD. They consider the file size of DVD rips to be small enough to begin with and don't want to give up any quality that the DVDs have to offer.

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As a side note, Handbrake should support hardware encoding on your Mac. Apple refers to this as VideoToolbox.

https://handbrake.fr/docs/en/1.6.0/tech ... olbox.html

If you use the software encoder (x264) and fine tune the parameters you might be able to achieve a slightly higher quality or a slightly smaller file size at the same quality. Using the hardware encoder (VideoToolbox) means you get whatever the hardware encoder gives you, but the choices is makes are reasonable for most situations. There are many fewer configurable options using the hardware encoder. The upside is the encoding will happen quite fast.