I've done shedloads (500+ discs) of rips through hand brake, mostly DVDs and some Blu-Rays.
What I discovered was, that unless you are rippling losslessly, your results will vary greatly from film to film.
The advice I give out is:
1. Start with the recommended defaults in Handbrake.
2. Rip a film you know well.
3. View that film on ALL platforms you are likely to view it on. [a]
If you are happy. You are done - keep ripping discs.
If not:
4. Adjust quality up/or down goto #2. Repeat until happy.
Do the above for each GENRE of film - Bright Action movies need different ripping specs compared to period dramas.
--
[a] I did not do this step originally, and the first batch of rips I did, looked good on my 24" monitor, good on my 50" plasma, and awful on my 9ft projector screen!
Pay special attention to videos whose source is TV (as opposed to film) because those sources tend to be interlaced, and you need to play around with the detelecine, decomb, and deinterlace settings. Unfortunately AFAIK Handbrake cannot detect this condition, and if you don't manually account for it, you'll get that ugly horizontal "comb" effect on output, during scenes showing motion.
For non-HD sources, I highly recommend MeGUI [1][2] (only on Windows, unfortunately). It's a bit more manual as compared to HandBrake, but they have an interface for AviSynth's interlace detection [3], which works pretty well.
I was using Handbrake to rip the DVDs of a certain low-budget 90's TV show (I am too embarrassed to say which) and noticed that certain special effects could confuse/anger Handbrake. Specifically, some cheap effect used to give a flat image the illusion of depth by making its outline gyrate back and forth combined with a lens flare, the effect was muted/eliminated when Handbrake ripped it, as though Handbrake was trying to stabilize the video or something. The effect was still visible on the raw MKV rip, but not after Handbrake's transcode.
They could have generated the effect at 60i instead of 30fps (* actually 29.97fps). Handbrake won't do interlaced encodes, for good reason, so deinterlace will remove half the motion.
You can switch to "bob" deinterlace if that's an option and it will come out 60fps.
What I discovered was, that unless you are rippling losslessly, your results will vary greatly from film to film.
The advice I give out is:
1. Start with the recommended defaults in Handbrake.
2. Rip a film you know well.
3. View that film on ALL platforms you are likely to view it on. [a]
If you are happy. You are done - keep ripping discs.
If not:
4. Adjust quality up/or down goto #2. Repeat until happy.
Do the above for each GENRE of film - Bright Action movies need different ripping specs compared to period dramas.
--
[a] I did not do this step originally, and the first batch of rips I did, looked good on my 24" monitor, good on my 50" plasma, and awful on my 9ft projector screen!