This might not be the best place for this question but I honestly can’t think of another place, but if you know of one please let me know. But I figured someone here might have the experience I’m looking for.
I own the discs for various Star Trek series and everything Stargate. What I’m trying to do is use handbrake to encode them to put them on Plex. But everything I try, it just looks worse. Is there a repository of like recommended settings for various media?
You might want to go down the rabbit hole of virtualdub2 and avisynth. Virtualdub provides a GUI for very simple editing but its main focus is encoding. Avisynth allows you to work with video files with scripts. The most advanced filters for improving quality are on avisynth. You can create a .avs script in notepad and then view it in Virtualdub as if its a video file.
You can start with just Virtualdub2. Use its built in deinterlacing filters (because those DVD’s are interlaced), resize filters (because the files on a DVD aren’t the correct aspect ratio) and video/audio compression. For X264, use quality based encoding at something like Q18 for almost perfect quality.
Trek DVD’s are particularly hard because they are a mix of film source and TV special effects so you need a dynamic deinterlacer that can switch between 3:2 pulldown for film parts (live action) and straight deinterlacing for special effects (space battles).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-two_pull_down#:~:text=Three-two pull down (3,of%20transferring%20film%20to%20video.&text=It%20converts%2024%20frames%20per,slight%20slow%20down%20in%20speed.
