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Curious if y'all use or can recommend any alternatives for Handbrake? Handbrake works all right but I get mixed results and sometimes errors like messed up aspect ratios. It seems to take a lot of adjustments to get a quality output that I'm happy with.

For ripping? I always used MakeMKV.

I don't have a great answer.
Usually I just tweak settings for each media type in Handbrake, making preview clips over and over until it's okay, then save a new preset. I have some for various DVD video sources that work for me now, so it's usually only small changes to my presets now.
If I need to do more comprehensive editing (adjusting gamma, levels, filtering, etc), then I use Super https://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html I think it's a frontend for FFMpeg. It seems really sketchy on the site, but the free version does work fine - I've been using it for years.
I have Vegas Pro, but whenever I need to do some video work, it's too much trouble to learn how to even start using it so I don't.
The only other video software I regularly use is Lossless Cut https://mifi.no/losslesscut/

Jagosaurus wrote:For ripping? I always used MakeMKV.

I'll look into it. Thanks.

Anapan wrote:I don't have a great answer.
Usually I just tweak settings for each media type in Handbrake, making preview clips over and over until it's okay, then save a new preset. I have some for various DVD video sources that work for me now, so it's usually only small changes to my presets now.
If I need to do more comprehensive editing (adjusting gamma, levels, filtering, etc), then I use Super https://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html I think it's a frontend for FFMpeg. It seems really sketchy on the site, but the free version does work fine - I've been using it for years.
I have Vegas Pro, but whenever I need to do some video work, it's too much trouble to learn how to even start using it so I don't.
The only other video software I regularly use is Lossless Cut https://mifi.no/losslesscut/

Previewing over and over is pretty much what I've been doing. Although, I've noticed some of the device presets seem to work okay. (Like specifying a Roku as the playback device, for example).

I don't think I've felt the need to do post-rip editing. Then again a lot of my films are older and grainy anyway. You can upscale Soylent Green to 1080p but all it does is make your file size larger with little in return.

I have some specific old analog situations that have some specific fixes using ancient software that I didn't want to bring up. I do have some software that I use to fix that specific problem. I rip to raw (YUV) and process in RGB using a large collection of ancient filters. I can provide this software if you need to fix these old analog problems.
VirtualDub and the AVISynth hacks can do some things to old footage that just isn't relevant now, so I don't know of another better way.
If you're really stuck with some old VCR footage of an old family memory where your best VHS/Beta/super-8 recorder is failing to track the rotting media, I would be able to fix it somewhat from a bad recording, or I can recover a lot more using my collection of old analog reading stuff.
I don't like doing it, but I know that I can do better than the local media recovery services as I've seen their expensive results - they used amazon-bought analog-to-digital usb garbage.

Just a quick update. I found that Brasero on Linux (not sure if it's on Mac or Windows) makes 1:1 copies of dvds. Nice for use with VLC media player on a pc.

On Windows, MakeMKV can take a DVD or Blu-ray and losslessly convert it to a single MKV file.

I still need to try out makemkv. Mostly interested in using an external blu ray drive for BD's. Any of y'all try that out yet?

I had a buddy do just that. Ripped a ton of my BDs for me. Worked well but uncompressed they're pretty large files lol.

Haven't tried an external, but no reason it wouldn't work. I used an internal BD burner. About 300 BD remux files takes up 18TB.