Help with video project

[crjackson2134]

I own a collection of Blu-ray discs that I recetly purchased (Battlestar Galactica - The Complete Series), and I ripped the individule episodes with subs and chapters to MKV files. All broken down by disc#/season#/episode# and named accordingly. Each file is about 17GB and there are nearly 40 files. The whole set occupies nearly 700GB. I don't really want to uses that much space on my media center drive. Right now I have it all stored on a 1TB USB drive but now that drive is useless for anything else.

I've got a couple of cheap 500GB USB drives, and I don't mind dedicating one of them for playback when connected to my media box (WDTV Live).

What I want to do is compress the files using handbrake without losing a lot of quality. Can someone recommend a startling point with the settings, or should I just select a particular preset profile? Which one?

I also have considered joining all the episodes of each season into one file using MKVToolNix but that seems to crap out and produce errors. The App. notifies me of the errors but I can't for the life of me figure out how to read the error log and see what they are.

Any advice on this little project would be appreciated. I don't need original quality, but I'd like to stay as close as possible.

I've asked for help at Video Help website but I'm not getting anything much there. That site is generally kind of down on people using Mac.

 

[ChrisA]

I own a collection of Blu-ray discs....

It's best to watch the Blu-ray disc itself. Any compressed copy will not be as good. Knowing this you can compress down to about 2GB per movie and it's not to bad. But you PAID for a Blu-ray and you get to watch a "not to bad" copy? What's the point of that?

With Handbrake the key thing is that slider. A setting from 19 to about 23 is about right. Just try it at a few setting from low to high and find your tolerance for quality and look at the file sizes.

 

[crjackson2134]

No, it is not best for me for reasons I won't post online. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to get up/down to change the disc. Thanks for your reply, you really helped a lot.

 

[jamesjingyi]

No, it is not best for me for reasons I won't post online. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to get up/down to change the disc. Thanks for your reply, you really helped a lot. I should have known better than to expect help here.

You could use something like Any Video Converter (which is free) to downscale to whatever size you wanted. Alternatively you could upload them to a media server and stream them? Or, if you wanted, you could buy a 1TB+ external HDD to store all the movies on and use something like Plex or Front Row (on an older Mac) to play

 

[crjackson2134]

You could use something like Any Video Converter (which is free) to downscale to whatever size you wanted. Alternatively you could upload them to a media server and stream them? Or, if you wanted, you could buy a 1TB+ external HDD to store all the movies on and use something like Plex or Front Row (on an older Mac) to play

Thanks, they're already being played from a media server but 17GB per episode (x40 episodes) is just too much space dedicated to one show. I did put them on a 1TB drive for now but it's an expensive drive I need for other purposes. I have 2x 4TB drives connected already but they only have about 1TB each left and I don't want to fill the drive with this series, I keep movies on them, this is the one TV series I own. I bought the collection because I had been watching it on Netflix but they took it down and I never got to finish watching it. If I could reduce each file to about 8GB, I could put it on a cheap 500GB drive without trouble and control everything with my media center remote.

I've never heard of any video converter, that sounds useful. Thanks for that, I'll check it out the next chance I get. Is that in the MAS or an independent download site?

EDIT:
Okay, so I looked up Any Video Converter, and see that it's a Windows program. Just a quick look at their website and it looks really decent. I think that may just be the tool I need. Thanks so much... I wish they had an OS X version, but I can do windows too. I just installed Win 8.1 on a bootcamp drive, it'll be a good chance to use it for something.

 

[FredT2]

I just use Handbrake with the Apple TV 3 preset and find the results to be perfectly fine.