Optimal Settings for BD Rebuilder Request

[QuadcoreHD]

Apologies to all as this has undoubtedly been posted before (and searching for nearly an hour I'm growing weary and cannot seem to find something exactly fitting my question) but I have a fairly straight-forward question I believe. I am the Author of a guide that was used a few years back on this forum that is currently a sticky and I hope people have gotten some use out of it. I have since come to an understanding of the ease and flexibility of the MKV (as well as that it seems to use a lot less resources on my machine when playing back through VLC or a similar program rather than PowerDVD or some similar format when using .ISO for your backed-up BD disc. With some minimal caveats that I will briefly outline in a moment, I would like to use BD Rebuilder to reduce the size of my already processed and saved .ISO files. My simple requirements are as follows:

I would like to begin limiting the space that my back-ups take on my system, but have the following basic requirements:

1. I do not want to convert from 1080P to 720P in general (unless it is a movie such as, for example, the Hangover 2 or Training Day, where quality is not as much as an issue for me personallly, as opposed to, lets say, Avatar, or Tron, where keeping 1080P and high quality image/sound is very important)
2. I'd like to keep the video quality as close to the original as possible in general (regardless of whether we are converting to 720P). By this I basically mean I don't want the naked eye to easily be able to tell one version from the other under normal viewing conditions (i.e. on a 42 inch LCD, or computer monitor, for example)
3. I would like to reduce the original "movie-only rip" somewhat significantly in size. Please note that I am already familiar with BD Rebuilders abilities when it comes to just getting the movie audio/video files so please do not include this in the answer. I'm happy with, for example, reducing a 20GB "movie/English audio only file to around half, but reducing to single layer DVD would be ideal. For example, I would be content with reducing Training day, which currently takes up 15GB on my machine when ripped with no re-encoding to around 7 GB although ideally, I'd like to reduce certain movies to the DVD-5 size
4. Lastly I just want to reiterate that quality is most important to me, and that is video quality

And---whew---finally to my question:

Can anyone who is very familiar with BD Rebuilder post the ideal settings for someone who is facing my concerns? Again, I want to basically reduce the feature track by half or more, keep resulution (for most files if possible but not a necessity) and would preferably like to encode to DVD-5 size, when possible.

Can anyone post the optimal or suggested settings, or at least some suggestions? This would be GREATLY appreciated.

Lastly please note I am fairly familiar with the program so basic info will suffice (i.e. I know how to get to to Setup tab and do all that good stuff).

Many many thanks to all, and happy holidays.

[setarip_old]

Hi!

Your request can be addressed in an embarrassingly simple manner:

1) Since you've already created "movie-only" versions of your Blu-ray discs, just set BD-RB to "Movie-only"

2) Set to either BD9 or BD5 (Many folks use 2 hours of total playtime as a maximum for BD5. Over 2 hours, use BD9)

3) For ALL other settings, leave them at their DEFAULT SETTINGS (These are NOT static. BD-RB actually evaluates the content and adjusts its quality settings accordingly)

[hello_hello]

Do you actually want to create a BD5 disc or are you happy with a single file format such as MKV (given you mentioned it)?
I know nothing about BD Rebuilder as I've never used it but it seems like it'll encode to MKV using a quality setting (CRF value) as well as the usual 2 pass encoding (which is much slower). I assume encoding to BD5 or BD9 size would require 2 pass encoding.
Using CRF encoding you simply pick the quality (18 to 22 would be typical with lower values giving a higher quality) and the file size will be whatever it'll be. I can't give you an idea of what file sizes to expect at 1080p as I encode everything at 720p, but at 720p my average CRF encode (using a CRF value of 20) would be around 2.5GB to 3GB. That's keeping the AC3 audio or converting to AAC. If you keep the DTS audio you can add about another 700MB. So far my smallest CRF 20, 720p encode is a tad over 2GB while the largest is 4.8GB (AAC audio).

I'm just suggesting CRF encoding as an alternative to creating a BD5 disc as it'll be faster, the quality will always be the same relative to the original (for a given CRF value) and by letting the file size be whatever it needs to be you're not wasting lots of bits on one encode while not using enough on another.
Of course if you're limited to playing BD5/9 compliant discs (which it doesn't sound like you are) then I guess all the above is irrelevant.

Do VLC or PowerDVD support DXVA? Even if they do, I'm not sure whether they'd use it while playing video in ISO files (which mightn't be of a type which can be used with DXVA anyway), but if you have a video card which supports DXVA (hardware decoding) and use a player such as MPC-HC which supports it, you should be able to get CPU usage down to almost nothing. I don't know anything about ATI but any Nvidia card from the 8000 series up supports at least h264 hardware decoding.
One other thought.... can BD Rebuilder crop the black bars when encoding using an MP4 or MKV container or does it always use 720p and 1080p resolutions etc? I'd assume it does but thought I'd ask anyway.