Basic ripping questions

[adam86w]

Well i am sorry if these questions have been asked before but i am pretty new to the world of ripping and i have searched google lots but i still have a few unanswered questions.

1. I am using a mac and handbrake, is handbrake a good program for ripping does it produce rips just as good as anything else available.

2.I have tried a few rips and the h.264 seems like a good choice everything looks good until there is a dark scene and it looks really pixelated.

3.I was using a bit rate of 2500, this is for playback on my ps3, should it be higher or lower or is that just right.

4.Lastly in handbrake its says source resolution and output resolution and when you click keep aspect ratio it changes the output resolution, why is this why cant you keep the same resolution and aspect ratio of the dvd, it was a widescreen dvd.

I was just wondering if i am on the right track to producing half decent rips or do i need to change program, codecs, bit rates etc? anyhelp is much appreciated.

Adam

[foxyshadis]

Handbrake is a fantastic gui, especially on the mac where there aren't many.

If you use anamorphic and 720 for the width, it will always give you the original height (480 or 576 w/o cropping), which is completely different from the width & height it displays as. The PS3 can understand aspect ratios, so you can do that or encode non-anamorphic.

On the advanced options page, you might want to turn on analyse all, 8x8dct, and perhaps b-pyramid, that might help prevent blocks, otherwise you can just try upping the bitrate. What's really required is a special x264 build with AQ, but that isn't built into handbrake yet. You can also try the bedlam preset, but you'll be lucky if that even finishes encoding overnight ;)

Make sure you're using detelecine, for sure.

[adam86w]

hi thanks for taking the time to reply, still some things i am unsure of, what would you recommend for the ps3 then keep aspect ratio or the anamorphic.

In codecs i chosen avc h.264 video/acc audio x.264 encoder, would you recommend this over mpeg 4 video aac xvid encoder/

Also should i use 2 pass or not bother and just enable the other settings you recommended.

I also read some where that you should not de-interlace all rips only certain dvds require it, is detelecine different from de interlace?

oh yea and where is this bedlam preset?

Thanks Adam

[mahsah]

AVC is better then xvid is most cases. 2 pass is great.

Also deinterlace is different from detelecine. Most mainstream titles are telecined.

[fibbingbear]

One comment about two-pass: I prefer CRF 18 (constant rate factor) to 2-pass. It's faster, and it encodes based on quality, as opposed to trying to hit a bitrate.

To be fair, 2500kbps is plenty high, so it's probably not an issue for you.

Just remember: if you have an extremely complicated source, it may actually need a bitrate higher than 2500 -- if you have a very simple source, 2500kbps may be overkill. Why not give the extra bits from the simple sources to the more complicated ones?

At least that's my understanding :p

[adam86w]

i suppose that seems logical, i just wanted to put all my tv shows like 24 etc onto my pc to stream them to my ps3, i dont think they are that complicated so from what you say 2500 should be fine, i would still rather watch my blue ray movies etc on disks.