Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

polevault139

macrumors 6502
Sep 24, 2006
342
0
Illinois
There is going to be a loss in quality no matter what you do. I have always converted my DVD's to H.264 format because it it smaller and I will never play them on a TV. If you do want to play the movies on a TV you might consider the other format even though it may be larger.
 

underaothfan1:D

macrumors newbie
Dec 1, 2011
15
0
sorry to bring up such an old thread, but if i wanted to put a whole season of a tv show on my ipod would handbrake be the right software to use?
Thanks in advance
 

flynz4

macrumors 68040
Aug 9, 2009
3,244
127
Portland, OR
there are various settings, but the quality is very good, you wouldn't really tell a difference, but there is a slight quality loss (to my understanding)

Handbrake is a video transcoder... which means it will decode a file, and then re-encode it into a different format. DVDs are encoded using MPEG-2 which is a fairly old technology and was invented back when more effective encodings were unpractical. Any time any lossy encoding is unencoded and then re-encoded... then some image loss will occur.

Most people now encode using MPEG-4 (H.264). It has about the same quality as MPEG-2, but results in significantly smaller file sizes. MPEG-4 was not economically feasible back when DVDs were invented. One of the most common uses of Handbrake are to convert MPEG-2 DVDs to MPEG-4 (H.264) files. You are very unlikely to notice any significant image degradation... but you can fit a lot more videos on your devices.

/Jim
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.