or an intel compustick if all you want is a media player ?

ive had my ps3 for 5 years now and decided to use it as a video jukebox 3 years ago
i already had it so i figured why not ?

I'll give those a shot. I can say that is the first Handbrake tutorial I have seen that is actually aware of the current version of Handbrake, which is a really good sign already.

Thanks for clarifying. :)

i used this guide from lifehacker to get me on my way
http://lifehacker.com/5559007/the-hassle-free-guide-to-ripping-your-blu-ray-collection

I used the same one ^_^ But cogadh was asking about DVDs and I totally forgot to link that because apparently I can't multitask.

Thank you good sir ^_^

That's a good way to put it. The options available are not terribly well documented within the app itself (some items have help popups written in "ripper-ese", others have no help topics at all), but the things it can do once you mess around a bit are pretty cool. The biggest thing I have been able to fix so far with my rips was getting back 5.1 surround sound and forced subtitles (subtitles where someone is speaking a language other than the normal language of the movie). The previous tool I used only made stereo rips with either no subtitles at all or subtitles permanently on. The only thing I can't figure out is the picture quality, every setting change I make seems to end up with the same less-than-perfect quality, just a larger file size or a file that is unplayable on anything except VLC (which seems capable of playing anything).

well dvd blu ray the principle is the same to be honest
you just adjust a few of the options and bob's your uncle

and its a good starting guide in my opinion


welcome
keep in mind its just a guide to get you started

This is what you want to follow, especially if your DVD's are protected, handbrake does not decrypt by default I believe.

that is odd
when trying my arcane voodoo magic with handbrake and trying to fit a blu ray rip in to a ps3's fat 32 limit i messed around with quite a lot of options and the difference was noticable

( untill i hit universal and put the rf slider to 23 thats where the result became sick as in small file size and good picture quality )

Yeah, AnyDVD is already taking care of that for me.
That's likely because you are working with a blu ray, which is already of much higher quality and resolution than the DVDs I am working with. You could compress the hell out of those video files and they would still look way better than what I am getting. Its entirely possible that what I am encountering is simply a limitation of the DVD format and the quality I am able to currently get is the best I will ever see (unfortunately).

^ possibly

but ive also encoded and ripped dvd's
and the quality on the whole is decent

but my threshold for awfull video is high i am a vhs affectionado

Success! I finally got a few quality rips completed (LOTR looks amazing!). Thank you all for your suggestions, they were immensely helpful, but it turns out the main problem was me. I'm the idiot who didn't check to see what quality was being used by my DVD ripper before I put the files into Handbrake. Instead of ripping the files raw, then compressing them as needed in Handbrake, I was ripping the files compressed, then compressing them again in Handbrake, hence why none of my quality adjustments in Handbrake seemed to have any effect.

^ and thats why i use makeMKV to rip the files straight from the dvd in an uncompressed format

but at least you figured out what was wrong