I don't really expect to change your mind with what I'm going to write here, but maybe someone will find it interesting.
I've been ripping and encoding media for almost 20 years now. In that time I've encoded and re-encoded quite a bit of media. I've ripped to low resolutions and high resolutions. Video transcoding (going from one CODEC to another, or one bitrate to another) always seems to take *forever*. Even with a fairly fast machine it's always an hours long operation.
When I first ripped my CD collection, I did so at 128 kbps as AAC. It sounded great. Well... at least that's what I thought at first. As I started listening to my digital music collection, I gradually got bored. I started hitting the "next" button constantly. ...and eventually I stopped listening to music almost completely except for a little in my car. Music just wasn't interesting any more. I wasn't sure why.
Years passed and I was listening to the radio some and mostly not liking what I heard. I was working at at stereo shop at the time and we had a new model of head unit from Pioneer that could natively decode FLAC files. Someone brought in some downloaded FLACs and some high bit rate MP3s and we listened a bit on some expensive car speakers from JL Audio. I was intrigued. Around that time the Pono came out and touted FLAC based lossless audio as being a wonderful musical experience that most people had never had. I was taken in by the dramatic reactions of people listening to Pono with bug eyes and excited body language and enthusiasm.
So I went home and ripped a couple of CDs as FLAC that I had sitting around. Put on my headphones and listened. Ho. Lee. Wow. I was really impressed and engaged by what I heard. I ripped another 20 CDs and kept listening. Suddenly I was listening to music for hours every day and more importantly I was *enjoying* it. A lot.
Fast forward a year or so and I had ripped (and bought) 300 to 400 CDs and continued to enjoy it. Today I have a slightly bigger collection and am more engaged with music than ever before. It's been about 6 years since that FLAC day for me.
Somehow, listening to low bit rate music, which sounded at first listen "just fine" robbed me of musical enjoyment. My brain just wasn't into it. Lossless audio brought the magic back for me.
There will be those who are saying right now "you just didn't use a high enough bitrate stupid. If you had just ripped to 320kbps MP3, you would have been fine." That might be true. I have done some tests and had poor luck in accurately picking lossless from 320kbps MP3. But here's the thing: Storage is cheap, cheap, cheap, and it's getting cheaper every month. With lossless audio, I will never, ever wonder if I have a high enough bitrate. I'll never wonder if there's something that the algorithm threw away. Because I have every bit that was on the disc and didn't waste any of it in search of disk space. Disk space which costs pennies.
Within a year or two of this experience, I started ripping my DVD collection, mostly using Handbrake. I spent *hours* and hours trying to figure out the right CODECs and bit rates for each. I did experiments with several different video sources at different video bit rates. There were seemingly endless parameters to choose from. De-interlacing. Multi-pass encoding. "Fast encoding". "Slow encoding". Medium. Choosing actual numbers. Jeez!
I did research to try to find "perfect video settings" for DVD encoding. I read multiple forum threads. I tried things. I settled on some settings and ripped a few dozen DVDs. I watched them on my 15" laptop screen and they looked fine. Good even. Then I took one of these encoded files. I think it was "The Incredibles" (which is an animated movie of high quality) and watched it on a bigger screen. Crap, crap, crap. Macro blocking. It looked ok, but the flaws were not all that hard to see. It was not a pristine representation.
I did a little more research and found some larger encoder values to use and contemplated re-ripping everything again. It was only a few dozen titles so far (less than 50). Which would be something like 100 hours of ripping and encoding time. I did nothing for a while.
Then coincidentally I saw a discussion on this forum about MakeMKV. I think mwilliems or maybe marko educated me about it. With MakeMKV I could get the original video and audio formats from the disc. Without any extra transcoding. Without any additional loss of data. Now DVD video and audio are already lossy compressed. But at least I would get the best lossy version available. By the way, BluRay is also lossy compressed for video. Just at a higher resolution, a higher bit rate, and generally with a more efficient CODEC.
So I ripped a few titles with MakeMKV and watched them on a bigger screen. They looked good. So I continued ripping more of my collection. Gradually I back filled and replaced all of my original handbrake rips with MakeMKV "pure copies". The came BluRay and I ripped a ton more. Oh, did I mention that MakeMKV rips took a fraction of the time of Handbrake? Instead of 2, 3, or even 4 hours for movie, it was more like 20 minutes. This was a big difference. ...and it didn't peg the CPU of my computer for hours while doing encoding. Because there was no encoding to be done. Just ripping.
Could I have found the magic combination of video encoding parameters that produced a result that I could not find flaws with? Maybe. I think it would have been hard, but it's possible. Again, I would probably wonder from time to time, especially when I saw something odd, "Is that an encoding artifact? Or was that on the original DVD (or Bluray)? " It would likely distract me from my viewing enjoyment. At least at some point.
But now that will never happen. Because I have "pure copies". They are big. 18 to 50 GB for each movie. But again, storage is cheap. It's getting cheaper. I'll buy bigger drives in a few years. It's already something like $0.50 per BluRay at today's prices for storage. It will be cheaper next year. ...and the next.
In my mind there is never a reason to add additional compression to a commercially released movie/tv show/album/etc. I am going to regret it at some point. But I will never regret having full bandwidth copies of everything.
That's my story. I hope it was an interesting read.
Brian.
