File size Bluray rips?

There's no one answer to your question. Every movie should vary even if all Handbrake variables remain exactly the same. I've seen end results as small as <2GB and as big as >20GB for same-length (minutes) movies. There's all kinds of variables at play in determining final file size. You can't really judge quality by some preconceived idea of what a good file size should be.

The TV3 preset is a good one. It optimizes most settings to try to yield a video file that is much smaller than the original without a noticeable change to video quality. All you can really do to judge is the eyeball test on your own setup. Can you see a difference that is enough to bother you? If so, tweak the settings a bit such as pull the constant quality slider down a notch or two. Some argue pretty passionately that 19 or 18 yields "impossible to see" differences. However, you are converting one compressed video to another so there MUST be a difference. So if you have amazing eyes and equipment, there might be no settings that wouldn't show a minor loss of something.

If you experiment and can't find any settings that sufficiently fool your eyes, you can always try using tools like subler to simply re-wrap the BD video in a container that can go into iTunes and play on TV. This skips the generational loss but will typically yield files almost as big as the MKV original.

Even if you get 500 answers in this thread, the only GOOD answer will come back to your eyes & your equipment. What I can offer is that end file size is only one indicator of quality (and I'd consider it a weak one relative to many other variables).

I use ATV3's but I make my bluray rips 720p and typically they come out to about 4-5gb for a two hour movie. They look great on my 50" plasma and are small enough to fit hundreds on my external drive. The quality is not bluray obviously, but it's pretty damn close. If I want to watch a movie on the projector/big screen, I go bluray, but the ATV's are more for convenience so the video/audio quality is not as important.

That is great to know ATV3 or 4 still work with handbrake created movie file. I have a lot of movies into iTunes just for watching on my iPad Air. I am planning to buy ATV3 later after what Apple have to say about new Apple TV 4.

I would leave the BR rip native. They are only 10-12GB, which is no big deal for me and not worth spending hours on recompressing. That way you have full quality with DTS/MA.
Just fix the playback so you can play full MKV's.

blanka said:

I would leave the BR rip native. They are only 10-12GB, which is no big deal for me and not worth spending hours on recompressing. That way you have full quality with DTS/MA.
Just fix the playback so you can play full MKV's.

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Most untouched Blu-rays with DTS-HD main track is more like 20-35GB.

StinDaWg said:

Most untouched Blu-rays with DTS-HD main track is more like 20-35GB.

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This.

I have yet to see any Blu-rays come across at 10-12 like the previous poster stated. Most of mine are typically in the 20s with some as high as 45 or so.

GhostMac24 said:

This.

I have yet to see any Blu-rays come across at 10-12 like the previous poster stated. Most of mine are typically in the 20s with some as high as 45 or so.

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He's probably downloading torrents and is confused, lol.

I've tweaked my settings somewhat for BD sources - I rip with MakeMKV, choose the AppleTV preset checking it will convert the DTS track to 640Kbps DD (Handbrake doesn't decode DTS MA so no point ripping that into the MKV if you're not keeping it) and generally drop down to 1280 width (720P for 16:9, or 544P for 2.35:1) and go for it from there. This compresses in a reasonable time on my machine. 1920 width encodes can take much longer - 3 or more times, and the resulting file is always at least twice as big whereas my 720P files are about 4GB. For my purposes, the files are good enough to run on my 100" projector although I would usually pull the BD out for that but on anything small like the 40" we normally watch they're indistinguishable from any normal watching distance. I've got the discs so should I want to I can always go back and re-encode to higher resolution. In my opinion a 720P running around 5Mbps is a way better choice than a 1080P rip at the same bit rate. Even though you've technically got higher resolution, the benefit is lost by the general loss of textures so why bother?

GreatDrok said:

In my opinion a 720P running around 5Mbps is a way better choice than a 1080P rip at the same bit rate. Even though you've technically got higher resolution, the benefit is lost by the general loss of textures so why bother?

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You should ask Apple that same question. They're pulling the same BS with their itunes 720p/1080p encodes.