Best Quality Handbrake Settings for BRRips Re-Encoding
I've been Re-encoding Blu-Ray sources for along time in Handbrake & I remember when I wasn't really sure what options to use to maximize quality & compression. I thought I'd share what I've found to be the most important for High Quality/Compression. These are the settings I've used that keep almost max quality even with lower bitrates. For an example: A 720p rip at 1280x528 keeps almost all quality (if there's not tons of grainy snow to encode) with only 1650 video bitrate & 160bit audio with these settings. The downside is it takes a long time to encode, around 6hrs, sometimes up to 10hrs at 1080p (times are with 3ghz dual core).
- On Video Tab select 2pass & turbo first pass & desired bitrate (1800 is even fine with these settings at full 1280x720p)
**On Advanced Tab**
Reference Frames - 6
Maximum B-Frames - 5
CABAC Entropy Coding - Yes
8x8 Transform - Yes
Weighted P-Frames - Yes
Pyramidal B-Frames - Normal
Adaptive B-Frames - Optimal
Adaptive Direct Mode - Spatial
Motion Estimation Method - UnevenMulti-Hexagon
Subpixel ME & Mode Decision - 8
Motion Estimation Range - 24
(some people use higher subpixel ME & ME range up to 32 if its a reall Movin movie, but its gonna slow ya down abit more)
** click add button to save changes to a preset **
- If you want even more Quality per bitrate you can put subpixel ME & Mode Decision to 9
- Ref & B frames are the max sane values for normal content but if you have alot of computer animation you can set Max B-Frames to 6 if you want a little more quality per bitrate.
- Container Mp4 or Mkv doesn't have any bearing on Quality only Compatability, if you use iDevices, I recommend mp4 with a single stereo audio track is very compatible.
- I've found Japanimation & older animation can lower (i use 16) Motion Estimation to speed up encode.
