How can compressed Blu-ray rips be better quality than original?

Short answer: unfortunately screen shots are not reliable at all when trying to determine quality--there are too many variables when a camera is pointed at a TV that it becomes difficult to distinguish between the quality of the video image (or lack thereof) and the quality of the photography (or lack thereof.)

In addition, there is no such thing as a free lunch so if you re-encode a file from 30GB to 10GB using the same codec you are going to lose....something. It might be texture detail. It might be smooth color gradients. But something will be lost. It's all a cost/benefit ratio and determining if the loss of the quality is acceptable (or even perceptible) in relation to the reduction in file size.

Often a noise reduction filter can be applied that will significantly reduce the "graininess" that also helps make the file more compressible. Of course, this can also have unintended consequences that are often noticeable as unnatural skin tones and textures.

IMHO, given the low cost of storage in 2013 I think you are following the correct path by using MakeMKV to keep the original encoding intact.
Edited by bluechunks - 1/9/13 at 8:14am

Read the last 200 posts in this thread:
http://www.avsforum.com/t/1336046/ripping-blu-rays-ii/0_100#post_20457745

I agree with BlueChunks 100%, above. As you know, the Blu-Ray is already compressed. Your goal should be not to do anything which might cause any further compression whatsoever. If you compress it further, I can promise it will not look "better" - it will only degrade. It will only appear worse.

And, one should never use a screenshot for picture quality comparison purposes, since there are way too many variables that have nothing to do with what is being viewed. You might use them for demonstration purposes ("look at how this shot was framed") but they are useless for trying to compare a quality of image.

I've used MakeMKV extensively in fact, hell I've even created my own profile for ripping!

MakeMKV can't reencode video, therefore the video ripping is lossless, but it can (losslessly) compress the subtitles and audio, same quality as before, less space used. so no, not compressing your rips is a stupid idea, if your media will play from some sort of PC, then you can reencode to FLAC. here's a link to my MakeMKV profile incase you're interested.

http://www.makemkv.com/forum2/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=5749

Literally impossible. Anytime you re-encode media in a lossy format you will degrade the image vs. the encoding source. Often the quality loss can be imperceptible though.

From a clinical perspective, this is also impossible. However, what you might be seeing is somebody who applied noise reduction to their re-encode. Despite what lots of people think, graininess in film is not an encoding artifact or error, it's part of the original image. Noise reductions will smooth out that graininess but also washes out a ton of detail. Some people prefer this look, although it's generally regarded as a bad thing by most "videophiles".

Here's a very common example:


The image on the left is far more accurate to what the original film looked like. The image on the right is after heavy noise reduction was done. Most people here would say the right side looks horrible, but there's a lot of people that prefer that look.

Absolutely agree -- spectacular example images. Grain is a tool of the cinematographer and director, as much as is lighting and shading, and is used to convey the feeling and mood of the work that the director wishes to impart and draw you into.

But as you note, many people will look at those two images and think the one on the right must be the BluRay and the one on the left must be DVD (or even VCR). That's why they sell so many of those god-awful LED/LCD's with that eye-popping over-processed unnatural super-realism -- called the soap-opera effect -- that makes people stop and stare in the store at the cartoonish image and go ooooooooh, like Homer Simpson.

I prefer the right side. :O

So on Handbrake if you set the RF to 0, your BD rip that was around 40gb is now 80gb. So what happens there? Is Handbrake removing compression?

No. Simply making a bigger file. Stuff that was taken away by 'lossy compression' (most video codecs) can never be restored. If you re-encoded it to uncompressed video (24 bit RGB) you'd use 49,766,400 bits per frame. At 60 FPS that's 2,985,984,000 bits per second. Even at those rates the PQ can be no better than the original. RF0 is simply lossless AVC (and being AVC will be smaller than un-compressed), but what you've already lost cannot be regained.

I am not positive on this for Handbrake (but pretty sure) -- the mode of action is to take the file you give it and decompress it, frame-by-frame, to the fully rendered images in RAM then re-compress the rendered images using the settings you give it. So when you get a bigger file than the original it is because the compression algorithm/settings is "less efficient" or higher bitrate than the original compression scheme.

Yes, it's using more bits to represent each frame, BUT you cannot undo lossy compression (which every video format you'll run into is lossy) You're merely wasting space at best, and at worst, losing quality while taking up more space.

No matter how you slice or spin it, it is like making a photo-copy of a photo-copy.

I wouldn't call myself (or my wife or son) a videophile, and I do use BD-Rebuilder to rip/convert my Blurays to 8-10 gig MKV files. When playing back the MKV's using our LG BD390 or BD570 players to my Sony 46" XBR6 it looks pretty good. In many cases our eyes can't tell the difference from the original bluray. But there are a few movies I can tell. And I would say that over all the quality looks no worse than watching the movies on HBO HD vs the original Bluray, but without some of the blockyness we see on fast motion scenes from Comcast compressing HBO HD.

The entire reason for ripping them to smaller MKV files? To getting more to fit on our home movie/media server. We can be in any room and watch any disc without having to run to the room where the DVD cabinet is and actually finding the disc.

I use BD-Rebuilder because it gives me a better image output than using something like Handbrake.

Which is what I just said, in fewer details...

... They both use same rendering engine...

Thanks. While they may use the same engine, the output from BD-Rebuilder always seem to look better than what Handbrake gives me. Colors when using handbrake seem to get washed out, not as vivid. I'm not sure why, and since BD-Rebuilder works and looks great, I keep with it.

BD-rebuilder must use different options then, I've noticed something similar, i tried compressing 2012 from BD copy, to about 7GB and it looked great on my macbook, but on my TV you could see all of the banding in the colors, pretty badly especially in the opening Sun gradients.

I re-encoded a BD movie that was 33 GB to 956 MB, and it looks just like 1080p on my iPhone

If you stuck a piece of duct tape across half the screen you could probably have encoded it to 500 MB.

That's like saying you can enjoy watching CAMs if you removed your eyes and replaced them with a low-res black and white camera...

I was being sarcastic!

Ooooh, Sorry, I was in an overly srs mood then. :c

I use Bdrebuilder and often compress down to 4.3gb. The significant others don't noitice at all. I really can't tell much difference either. For my really favorite movies I compress to 23gb. I use iso btw and stream with the Netgear 550. Terrible machine but does one thing flawlessly; streami iso's.

So MakeMKV will make files with identical audio/video quality as the original bluray, even those encoded at more than 40Mbps?

So MakeMKV will create bit-for-bit identical audio/video files to the original bluray, right? No loss when making MKV files?

Correct. It takes the selected video, audio and subtitle streams and remuxes them into a MKV container. It doesn't change or re-encode them.

 

Thanks elario ...what a relief indeed!