EDIT: Thank you so much everyone! There’s so much help for me here, and I’ll recommend anyone with similar question as me to read the comments
Basically title.
I have the DVDs and I have the hardware to burn them to my PC.
But the file size is too much. What software would be ideal to get the best quality with the lowest file size?
I’m going for file sizes per movie at around 2-3gb max.
If you don’t know anything about ripping video content, Handbrake is a good place to start. Regarding video codecs and best compression (filesize wise), I’d recommend x265 with HE-AAC (fdk-aac in particular). It will take longer to recode than x264, but it is worth it.
And 2 to 3GB is a lot more than what I had in mind. With x265, you can downsize it all to 700MB easy and get approximately the same quality as the DVD. If your target size is 2, 3GB, you could recode to x264, no need for x265.
Size wise if you are already taking the hit for time, you are now better off using AV1 instead of h265. Combine it with 120k OPUS for the best size-quality.
Assuming your planning for the future as av1 support is mostly software decoding rather than hardware.
Yeah, but x256 is a better choice regarding compression. And x265 has good software support as well.
Believe it or not, AV1 is better for compression across the board. https://subclassy.github.io/compression
The author uses ffmpeg as it’s encoding library. Ffmpeg doesn’t implement all x265 features. Have no idea about AV1, but it’s generally not advisable to use ffmpeg as an x265 encoder.