Robservatory:

An ideal rip would be one that happens in seconds, saves into a 10KB file, and has quality matching the original. The reality, though, is far from the ideal. Ripping a movie involves making trade-offs between those three competing measures: Maximizing any one measure requires some sort of tradeoff with one or both of the other measures.

After ripping so many DVDs and Blu-rays over the years, I was curious about how HandBrake and Don Melton’s Video Transcoding tools handle those tradeoffs, so I decided to do some testing.

A friend of mine used to be the “encoding Guy” at Apple back in the early days of the iTunes store. He described encoding as “a Black Art. You don’t have to kill a goat at midnight under a full moon to get it right but it helps”. Griffiths does a good job at explaining what happens when you encode, why it happens and what to expect, quality and file size wise.