Any software that is free or has a smallish cost that would encode and check quality of video encode. All the options are overwelming with handbrake/ffmpeg.
I just want to re-encode videos, but keep the quality without changing the audio/subitiles. I have a very large bluray library and need to shrink it.
Currenly looking at AV1 as it should handle film/movie noise better.
I do not mind if software is an online service. I have local hardware that I can have run.
MakeMKV and Handbrake are probably your best choices. Just use one of the preset encoding options.
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I second the above, MakeMKV and Handbrake are great and probably the most user friendly choice. Although I will say I don’t at all regret struggling through learning a bit about ffmpeg, and while “just do the hard thing?” is probably an annoying response to you specifically saying you were overwhelmed with it, if you’re ever curious about trying to make it work I’d definitely encourage giving it a try!
I’ve got a script that uses ab-av1 to approximate some decent settings on a per-movie basis (though ab-av1 seems to be a bit of a contentious approach? I dunno, works well enough for me) and then transcodes with those settings. Seeing the file size shrink as much as it does while the output is imperceptibly different feels like magic.
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Granted this is not something I’ve dealt with in a long time, but I don’t think you’re going to find anything much easier than using presets in handbrake.
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Handbrake is probably your best option. Now, if your library of Blu-ray rips are all or mostly in h 264/AVC, two things to consider are: is how muchyou want to get it done quickly
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I recently went through this process with FFMPEG
it takes time to test clips even when you find presets
my suggestion is to take a short one and test/retest. Even looking up presets, it takes times to check against your own hardware results.
I have a few scripts I run to check for webms in a folder and convert them. Handbrake took way too long.
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I’m sorry but I think I’ll have to burst your bubble.
There is no easy way to do that.
Whether the quality matches your expectations is subjective and you will have to decide this for yourself, there is no way for a software to decide this.
I know a lot of people recommend Handbrake but I will say I do not recommend this at all.
From the few times I used it, it makes a lot of assumptions for users that don’t care much about the outcome and has a lot of footguns built in that you have to disable to get to your expected outcome (for example it discards some tracks by default, burns subtitles by default in some(?) presets). It is very opinionated in how it approaches things instead of doing the minimalist thing and let you build from there.
Using ffmpeg is also not complicated, but it is a learning curve. However, arguably a learning curve worth taking even just once. Just make sure you write down your findings for later reference.
If you really want to automate “quality control”, you can calculate the VMAF of the source vs. the encode and that will give you a rough idea of the quality.
However - 2 caveats with this:
- The VMAF algorithm is (to my knowledge) not yet optimised for AV1. It will work, and it will output a rough number, but it’s not what it was designed for.
- The VMAF score you get at the end is an average, which means you can have the occasional frame that scores way below the average. Whether that is relevant to you is up to you to decide (and depends on what frame that is). My encodes were scoring in the high 90s, but there were occasional frames in the 30s. These were essentially single-frame outliers, so not actually relevant when watching at full speed. But be mindful of it.
I wrote a script to calculate the VMAF and output it to a file here:
It should be noted that there is always generation loss with (lossy) encoding. How much that is of course depends on the encoding parameters but that is where where the quality-efficiency-time triangle comes in. You can pick two, but you can’t have all three.
You either have good quality and an efficient encode, but then the encode will take a lot of time (in AV1). Or you have an efficient compression in a short amount of time, but lose quality. Or you have a fast encode with good quality, which looses efficiency.
No matter what clickbait articles tell you, there is no magic bullet to video encoding. There is a reason all this overwhelming amount of options exists in the first place.
The parameters you need primarily depend on your source and the content you are trying to encode, which is going back to what I said about Handbrake: It tries to be a jack of all trades, but it is a master of none. The presets are “fine”, but if you care about quality you will quickly find out you will have to dive into the actual encoding options, many of which Handbrake does not expose.
Generally speaking if you don’t want to get too deep into the weeds with encoder options, use CRF (Constant Rate Factor) and pick a CRF value that the encoder considers “visually transparent”, which will give you good quality, but at the cost of efficiency and/or time. CRF values vary by encoder, but for SVT-AV1 I believe it is 27.
As I alluded to above I went through the same struggle at the beginning of the year and I ended up settling on a) testing various knobs and options in ffmpeg and b) once I found what I wanted, set up a Tdarr instance and threw my show at it. I set up a schedule to let it run at night, because as I said, if you’re planning on doing AV1 and with good quality, expect some long encoding sessions.
My encodes averaged about 4 hours hours for a 1 hour episode. So if you have an entire show, plan a couple weeks minimum. Then again I might have gone a bit overboard with the options, but I am scoring high on VMAF so take from that what you will.
I will say it was worth it for the show. The BD rips were 2-ish TB, after encoding the entire show is 250-ish GB. And funny enough, on a lot of the episodes the audio track(s) make up about half the filesize.
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Two questions and a caveat:
- Are the Blu-ray rips all or mostly h.264/AVC files? If yes and you’d like to convert them to AV1 to save space
- Do you have a recent/recent enough GPU with a good AV1 encode/decode ASIC like a Nvidia RTX 4000/5000 or Intel Alchemist or Battlemage cards?
While doing the encode entirely in software in Handbrake will result in the best quality/size, that can take quite a long time. So, if (the caveat !) a ~20% size penalty (increase) for an equivalent quality AV1 encode by ASIC vs. one by software is okay, it’d greatly speed up converting a whole bunch of h.264/AVC Videos to AV1, and still save a significant amount of space. If you go that route, I’d try one or two videos first to see if that’d work for you.
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I am not worried about runtime, just want to shrink TV shows / movies. I will be able to run AV1 encode locally. I know I will have some loss on the video, but should work well on older blurays with noise I think.
I have messed around with GitHub - n00mkrad/nmkoder: Media encoding, muxing, analysis toolkit for Windows but this is not an active project.
I will try the VMAF and ab-av1 to get initial settings. Thanks!
Currently I have kept all original language audio tracks and discarded the dubbed tracks. Did not realize till now I could discard DTS 5.1 and keep only DTS-HD MA 5.1. That is a good idea. Thanks!
All are blu-ray rips from MakeMKV software.
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I don’t think you can, as I understand it DTS-HD is an extension of the DTS track. This is for backwards compatibility, so on the bright side having both doesn’t take up any additional space.
DTS-HD MA tracks always carry their core with them, so yes if there is a separate DTS (Core) track, it can be discarded.
I’m not sure why for DTS MakeMKV rips both separately, but for Dolby it does not. I don’t know the intricacies of the codecs but it’s possible that for Dolby the core track can’t be extracted separately, but for DTS it can.
In theory players will just fall back to the core if they can’t handle the lossless additions, in which case the separate track is not required. Whether that actually works would have to be tested with whatever player is being used.
Also should be noted this is in contrast to Dolby where TrueHD and DD Plus tracks are not backwards compatibly. So if you have a playback device that doesn’t support them then you also need the separate DD core track.
On that note you can set MakeMKV up to not rip the core track in the first place. However, it seems this doesn’t differentiate between Dolby and DTS so it’s not all that useful unless you know you’re only gonna be ripping DTS.
edit:
But also, I’m not sure how you would go about automating the removal. I guess you could select by language and disposition (which requires the source files to be tagged correctly) and then just… y’know… pray that it doesn’t discard a track you wanted. But then again you can check the files before actually replacing the old.
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Hi Warbler7,
You’re right — the options in HandBrake and FFmpeg can definitely feel overwhelming at first!
If your goal is to re-encode your Blu-ray rips to AV1 while keeping original audio and subtitles, here are a few good approaches depending on how hands-on you want to be:
- Easiest option — HandBrake GUI
HandBrake’s latest versions (≥ 1.7) include AV1 (via SVT-AV1 or libaom) support.
Try this setup:
Video Codec: AV1 (SVT-AV1 encoder is faster)
Quality: Constant Quality around 30–34 (lower = better quality, larger file)
Audio: “Passthru (Copy)” to keep original tracks untouched
Subtitles: “Passthru” as well
That’ll shrink your files nicely without extra complexity.
- More control — FFmpeg (CLI)
If you prefer a command line and want predictable results:
ffmpeg -i input.mkv -c:v libsvtav1 -crf 30 -preset 6 -c:a copy -c:s copy output.mkv
-crf controls quality (lower = higher quality)
-preset balances speed vs efficiency (4–8 is a good range)
-c:a copy and -c:s copy keep your original audio/subtitles
- Quality checking
You can compare results with:
VMAF or PSNR/SSIM metrics in FFmpeg for objective checks
Or simply use A/B comparison in a media player like MPV/VLC
Tip
AV1 is amazing for storage savings and visual fidelity, especially for noisy film content, but encoding can be slow — so consider running it overnight or using GPU AV1 encoders if your hardware supports it (Intel Arc, RTX 40-series, etc.).
Hope that helps make the process a bit less overwhelming!
What kind of hardware are you running the encodes on? That can help fine-tune the settings.
— Eimmaa Rose
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