And now nearly 122GB later, we have the entirety of Deep Space Nine encoded to H.264! 🥳 I played around a bit with H.265 but it only saved about 100MB or so an episode and took a fair bit longer to encode so I decided it wasn't worth it. I'm surprised at how good the resulting quality is given the source material is just standard definition, even when viewed on our 55" TV.
Speaking of encoding times, I'm also converting the special features as well and I don't know what it is about them compared to the actual episodes but they're taking an eternity. One of the features for Season 1 is 18 minutes long and it took 26 minutes to encode, versus an average of probably 8-10 minutes for an entire 45-minute episode of the show! The file size isn't even abnormally large, it's just taking ages. Having skipped through to see what was in it, there are a number of interviews from like 1992 that look like they were being played back through VHS so I wonder if it's just all the artifacts in those segments that's causing Handbrake to have to work a lot harder...
