Handbrake Questions

I've been playing around with Handbrake for about a year now. Up until now I like it. I was using it to rip my DVD's to various formats for iTunes and the like. These DVD's don't come with a digital copy as some of them are quite old.

I was using the default settings for awhile and dealing with all the blockiness in the videos and thinking well this is just how its going to be. Even after changing some settings I noticed that there is distortion and blocks here and there etc etc. When playing Video back on iTunes its at its worst but VLC is good.

Recently Ive been trying to fix this issue and trying to figure out how to convert file types so that they have the same or the best possible quality as I change their format. Some movies look horrible, once they are converted from one format to another. Is there anybody who has alot of experience with this and would be willing to give some good advice?

 

I made and saved a preset seems to work pretty good. Changed the RF setting to "1". It seems that its working better with this setting. Still sometimes when using iTunes it gets a little blocky only at first, but not through VLC player. It might be an issue with iTunes. Otherwise this setting seems to work pretty good. Ty for the advice, I'm still open to more if anyone has any.

 

As I said Ive been playing around with the settings, converting different formats. Several times ion the standard settings a movie that was in mkv. format would not go to mp4 without lots of distortion, and the like.