I just want to confirm my understanding and that I am doing the correct thing in regard ripping (or re-ripping) my DVD collection using handbrake. This is an area I don’t really have any knowledge in.
After a little bit of reading it seems any standard DVD is almost certainly recorded at 576p and 24 FPS these being standards of the film industry.
If I put a DVD in my external optical drive and open it in handbrake I see the following information (highlighted in red)
No expert on media stuff but I can share my experience.
When I ripped all my DVDs 12 months ago I used the Handbrake HQ 576p25 Surround preset with auto-cropping on. This gave nice quality results and saved some file space.
However, I ended up starting over, re-ripping everything using MakeMKV. I found it was far easier to remux to a MKV container a 1:1 copy of the DVD and add that to my Plex library.
You get an exact copy of the DVD and its far faster then re-encoding with Handbrake but takes up a little more space. (just remember to uncheck the trailers etc you don’t want off the DVD).
Overall I’ve been very happy with the results. Only had 1 issue were my FireTV stick using the Plex app couldn’t show the english subtitles in The Last Samurai. I opened the MKV file with Handbrake and burned the “forced” subtitles into the video to create a H.264 copy and that works great.
MakeMKV or Handbrake will give acceptable results.
The biggest difference, initially will be the default filter settings in Handbrake that will De-Interlace/Detelecine the rip if you are not actively trying to do that.
MakeMKV will do a 1:1 copy and if the disc was telecined/interlaced it will stay that way. This is generally a larger problem for NTSC material as it is usually interpolated from 23.976 to 29.97 fps for compatibility with older CRT TVs. It looks like you’re in a PAL region so there is no interpolation on DVD it should remain at 25 FPS.
One thing you can do if you are concerned about playback and clarity, is to rip it both ways and then view the file info with mediainfo to see if the file was interlaced/telecined/interleaved etc.
As to the subtitle issue, AFAIK if you have image based subs, VOB or IDX/SUB, then plex might have issues playing them.
