Some HandBrake Help

JukeBoxJosh

My friend told me about this program called HandBrake, and what it does is converts DVDs into iPod-ready format (MP4), along with 2 others, but I'm not interested in them. I've already done 4 episodes of The Tick animated series at a Low-Rez encode (using that word right?), and it looks pretty wonderful.

So, right now I'm trying to put Batman Begins on my Mac, and I decided to take a quick look through the settings (I didn't bother when uploading The Tick), and I see average bitrate. I only have a slight idea on what this will do, and that is that the higher I set it, the faster it will load. Is this true? Will it help at all? Should I just let the program do what it's supposed to do without fiddling with the settings?

All help is greatly appreciated.

Apreche

Average bitrate is pretty simple.

Let's say you have a video that is 5 seconds long, and you set the average bitrate to be 100 bits per second (I'm just making up numbers). The resulting video file will be about 500 bits large. If you set the bitrate to be lower, you will get a lower quality video because you are removing information. Setting the bitrate lower will also mean that handbrake will take a longer time encoding the video because it has to do extra processing to compress it to that smaller size. However, it will also mean that the video will take up less space on your iPod. Setting the bitrate higher will do the exact opposite.

You have to figure out what quality of video you want, how much space you want the video to take up on your iPod, and how long you want to wait for handbrake to do its thing. Then set the bitrate accordingly.

Cramit

I have tend to set the target size when I use handbrake, rather then average bit-rate. I figure about 350-500 MB per 30 minutes. I also make sure I select 2 pass encoding, It takes longer, but produces better results.

JukeBoxJosh

I started to encode Batman Begins on Hi-Rez about forever ago, and it's finally done. It looks nice, but I don't wanna have to dump lots of GeekNights and music to fit it on my Nano. So, now I'm experimenting with Pinky & The Brain on Low-Rez, each of the episodes from Disc 1, Vol. 1 all have subtitles as a constant, and the bitrates are the variable. I decided to have subtitles just because reading them keeps me occupied, and I'd like to know the best bitrate for the subtitles to be readable.

Thanks for the very idiot-ready advice, guys! Like I said, greatly appreciated!

...

I figure about 350-500 MB per 30 minutes.

What the heck!? That's huge! A decent to good quality one and a half hour DVD-rip is mostly compressed to 700 MB. And that's with DivX/Xvid. MP4's generally use a better codec so you can get very decent quality on an iPod video screen at 200 MB/30 minutes. Even less if you watch cartoons and anime since most of those tend to have huge areas with one colour, cellshading and so on.

Anyways, you want variable bitrates as much as you can.