Don Melton has updated his very smart video encoding scripts to make them far more automated, and significantly faster too:

…this package automatically selects a platform-specific hardware video encoder rather than relying on a slower software encoder.

Using an encoder built into a CPU or video card means that even Blu-ray Disc-sized media can be transcoded 5 to 10 times faster than its original playback speed, depending on which hardware is available.

Slightly surprisingly (given his Apple background) he recommends Windows as the platform of choice, largely due to to nVidia’s superior NVENC encoder.

Encoding a 30GB BluRay rip of Princess Mononoke took about 15 minutes, which from memory is about half the time taken compared to his older software driven scripts. The resulting file was 6GB which is far more manageable. I haven’t tried a lower bitrate for portable devices yet.

(Tip: The scripts auto-detect any installed hardware encoders and choose the best one, but I had to force it using the —hevc flag. Turns out it was because I hadn’t updated my nVidia drivers to the latest required version, which the script log shows when you use the specific flags. Otherwise it simply falls back to software encoding, which I hadn’t noticed.)

I still struggle slightly with the logic of doing this given the price of storage these days, though it does make sense for Plex streaming efficiency and portability. But it also means you’re watching a lossy source, which seems counter intuitive when we’re all buying 4K OLED screens precisely because of their image quality.

However I suspect it’s like high quality lossy audio - blind testing can’t differentiate there, so hopefully the same thing applies here. I haven’t spent time doing an A/B comparison, but I trust that these scripts are already pretty well tested given their popularity. In any case I think I’ll keep the full fidelity rips somewhere. The ripping process using MakeMKV is pretty slow for BluRay, so it’s not something you would want to repeat.