[HELP] How do I keep DVD rips small in size?

[raven-au]

Hi!

I have a lot of DVDs that take up a lot of space, so I'm trying to find a way to make them smaller in size. I'd wish to have them smaller in size without losing quality.

You can encode it with x264, or better yet, x265, and probably get a much smaller file without any loss in perceived quality. That is, you probably won't notice any quality loss, unless you strain your eyes and look for it. However, you have to know something about the encoding options to be able to achieve that. If you are new to encoding (I'm presuming!), try a CRF encode. Filtering out noise and compression artifacts would greatly help, as selur mentioned.

It's worth saying this again, to be clear.


The thing is that the modern encoders, x264 and more recently x265, can encode videos with little or no perceived reduction in quality.

For DVDs I have used a crf of 20 with x264 and had very good results, reducing the crf further often won't get perceivable improvement so lowering it a bit, say 18, will make the encode larger so the reduction in size will be less but the quality should be about the best you can get. You need to experiment a bit before you chose.

While the quality of DVDs is not nearly as good as Blu-Ray discs that is what's been produced at the time. There can often be some noise or other artefacts but trying to eliminate them can easily make the video look worse. Be very careful with noise reduction, it shouldn't ever be needed and if used at all a low setting is often better.

Beware that artefacts in the source video are often increased by re-encoding them (I say re-encode because they too are a result of encoding in the first place), that's just the way it is.

While the x265 encoder provides better quality and uses less space there's the problem of playback.
While it's "better" decoding them for playback takes more resources and there's the question of whether your playback devices are even capable of playing them.