Under Picture settings, you can usually go with the defaults in most cases, but you may want to preview and step through to check if the auto cropping did a good job. I recommend leaving Level at auto, or not to set it above 4.0 unless you know your clients can support higher. (And yes, placebo doesn't really add much to what you get with 'slower' or 'veryslow', which is why I almost never use it.)Īs for encoder settings, you should try to select the tune that matches your media (film or animation are the ones I use most often.) For Profile, you can set that to auto, but I generally use high. 'Placebo' or 'veryslow' settings can push encode times into the double digits in hours (particularly with H.265 or with other filters enabled) but will give you the best quality at the smallest size. For top quality, I will use RF 18 and the 'placebo' preset. I generally encode my stuff on 'veryslow' or 'slower' for most things. The 'medium' setting should be considered the low bar. Always go with the slowest preset you can tolerate time-wise. While RF sets the quality target, the encoder preset generally helps with file size optimization and quality enhancement.

~18-19 is equivalent to raw DVD and anything lower is just wasting disk space.) (Lower values are higher quality and larger size. Reasonable CQ RF values for H.264 range from 18-28, with 23 being a good baseline. I can make some specific recommendations, but really the basic rules are: I use different settings depending on the media type and content. I have close to 1,500 DVD and Blu-Ray disks in my home media collection, and I've converted most of them at this point. A lot will depend on your tolerances in terms of quality and encoding speed. I don't know what kind of Smart TV you have so I couldn't check to see if it is listed on the Plex site, but I'm pretty sure Apple TV supports the settings specified above.Īs for specific encoding settings in Handbrake, there are a ton of guides on that. Video Encoding: H.264 (level 4.0 or lower)Ĭontent that exceeds the capabilities of your client device will generally need to be transcoded. However, as a baseline, most Plex clients can Direct Play content with the following settings: That way they can use Direct Play and avoid having to do any transcoding at all.Ĭheck What media formats are supported on the Plex site for specific information. The best way to pre-optimize your media is to encode your original media to match the native capabilities of your Plex clients.

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