Kevin Andrew Wolfe Search for the Holy Grail of HandBrake Settings

Search for the Holy Grail of HandBrake Settings

Posted in Blog, Experiences on Monday, March 8th, 2010 at 8:26 am 3 Comments

One of the most difficult things I’ve been trying to do lately is wrap my head around the advanced features of the popular video conversion utility HandBrake. My ultimate goal is to convert a massive stack of digital movies into a single file for each movie for the purpose of displaying on a big screen from a Mac running the Plex media center software.

The first hurdle I had to jump was that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get the latest release, 0.9.4, to encode *anything* other than a 4KB file. Random and frustrating. Downgrading to 0.9.3 solved that issue with the trade-off of a few new features. Any of the built-in presets work pretty well, but “pretty well” just isn’t good enough for me. If I’m gonna run my Macbook Pro at 100% for 2-4 hours per film, I better get the absolutely best results for my money, figuratively speaking. Thus the search begins!

Short list of key goals:

  • Maintain proper look and feel for the film. (It should feel EXACTLY the same as a DVD when watching. Same motion, color, and  quality.
  • Render a file that is no larger than the source DVD. (Not a hard thing to do. I just don’t want to end up with 12GB files.)
  • Match quality of source DVD as closely as possible.
  • Maintain 5.1 audio tracks. (In the future, when I have a nice surround system, I want a true 5.1 file.)
  • Low Priority: Maintain compatibility with other devices. (iPhone, iPad, Apple TV)

Last night I thought I had found the settings I’d been searching for, but this morning I found two key issues.

  • In scenes with a lot of motion, the video looks like it was shot at a higher shutter speed than the source. (Things *appear* to move faster, thus breaking the original feel of the film.
  • Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen errors out when trying to open. It is over 5GB and Large file support was not selected. That is probably the only issue, however, I fear it will break compatibility.

Here’s the basic idea of what settings I’m testing now:

  • Universal Preset Based
  • Detelecine: Enabled
  • Decomb: Default (1:2:6:9:80:16:16)
  • Anamorphic: Loose
  • Crop: Automatic
  • Forced Subtitles Only: Enabled
  • Audio Track 1: AAC Mixdown at 160kbps
  • Audio Track 2: AC3 Passthrough
  • Advanced x264 Options String: level=30:cabac=0:ref=3:mixed-refs=1:analyse=all:me=umh:no-fast-pskip=1

The search will continue. Anybody care to share your settings or ideas? Tips?

  • Dave Berzins

    Hi Kevin.

    Just found this blog post via Google. I am having the EXACT same issue. It's almost as if I wrote the above article with what I am trying to accomplish. Since your original post have you fine tuned your process any? Would love to get some insight into what you've set on.

    Dave…

  • http://www.andrewspeaksout.com Andrew Wolfe

    To be honest, I haven't really fooled with this much at all since this post. I ended up falling back to a preset for Transformers (I don't remember which one.) I'm going to need to revisit HandBrake soon though because of a growing DVD collection. Have you discovered some good techniques yourself?

    • Dave Berzins

      Well it’s been and on and off thing to be honest. So the short answer is no. I’ve not found anything I would commit to sit down and ripping 100′s of DVD’s with. I tried the setting you had above and honestly they seem to be ok. Still looking and I’ve bookmarked your site to come back to if I do indeed find something that does exactly what we both seem to be looking for. Man you would think this would be simple!

  • Search for the Holy Grail of HandBrake Settings
  • Search for the Holy Grail of HandBrake Settings
  • Search for the Holy Grail of HandBrake Settings
  • Search for the Holy Grail of HandBrake Settings
  • Search for the Holy Grail of HandBrake Settings

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