Producing high quality/small size video from Blu-ray rip?

[CheesyTators]

I am new to Blu-ray and HD video encoding/rebuilding etc.... I noticed Apple's 1080p movies via iTunes look outstanding and they are relatively small (3-6GB per 2 hour movie.) Is it possible for me to achieve the same result with Handbrake and an existing Blu-ray I have ripped to my hard drive? What settings would I need to use? Is this even possible or does Apple use super secret squirrel software and encoding technology?

Thanks for the help.

[MisterMe]

Blu-ray is all copy-protected.

[Menneisyys2]

Originally Posted by CheesyTators

I am new to Blu-ray and HD video encoding/rebuilding etc.... I noticed Apple's 1080p movies via iTunes look outstanding and they are relatively small (3-6GB per 2 hour movie.) Is it possible for me to achieve the same result with Handbrake and an existing Blu-ray I have ripped to my hard drive? What settings would I need to use? Is this even possible or does Apple use super secret squirrel software and encoding technology?

Thanks for the help.

Well, I certainly wouldn't call iTunes videos "outstanding" - they certainly exhibit all the symptoms of too high a compression rate: banding, compression artefacts etc. (See http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1340463 for an excellent comparison.) Go for significantly less compression with HandBrake - around 10 Mbps bitrate for 1080p.

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Originally Posted by MisterMe

Blu-ray is all copy-protected.

MakeMKV rips it nonetheless and it's legal in most countries.

[CheesyTators]

Thank you for the info. I will try your suggestion.