A deep dive into HandBrake and Video Transcoding
An obvious interest area of mine is in ripping (and watching) movies using my Mac. I've talked about everything from installing the tools I use to how I rip to how to make sure I update the ripping tools. And though I've included some comparison pictures in the how-I-rip article, I've never done a deep dive into the various ripping options and how they compare on three key fronts:
- Speed: Faster is better; measured in minutes required to rip.
- Size: Smaller is better; measured in MB of drive space used.
- Quality: Higher is better; the closer the image quality is to the original, the better.
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.
If you'd like to see what I discovered about ripping time, file sizes, and—with lots and lots of frame grabs—image quality, keep reading…