How far might a 9800 bitrate be reduced in Handbrake before an mp4 or mkv file has lost anything the human eye can detect? Emphasis in tutorials and articles seems more on being economical with drive space and so on. After I bought my first big hard drive I was tempted to re-rip my CDs as flac but couldn't get past the thought that it was pointless, which colours my ideas about DVD.Īnd then, I think about mp3 files and how many argue, and as seems to me, that a 320k mp3 is missing effectively nothing the human ear can detect, even if the notion of compression offends some music lovers. If I set 9800 as the bitrate in Handbrake and pick the 'film' and 'high' settings in the Video tab, will I effectively get what MakeMKV would retrieve from a DVD? I see in the 'Constant' option as opposed to average bitrate, choosing to set the dial in the extreme right position can mean a file drastically bigger than the source - but is there a setting on that dial that equates to lack of compression or lack of inflation, or is it just not consistent enough to ascertain what setting you'd need there? I'm just thinking that the algorithms used are presumably something like as intelligent as those used in DVD production and that a DVD ripped at the bitrate's source should be not far off being as good as the contents of a DVD saved in the mkv container.

Say for example I have a film I can ascertain has a bitrate of 9800, which fluctuates anyway. I've just been wondering as of this week about the possibility of using Handbrake to effectively do the work of MakeMKV. Then there was a bit of bother with the free license key for the beta at about the same time I realised that the Linux version of Handbrake will rip DVDs with copy-protection. I had ripped all my DVDs using MakeMKV, initially using the Windows version until I went pretty much Windows-free.

Makemkv beta key feb 2016