[42yen]

Hello~

Complete nub here. I have Frodo installed and have been converting some of my collection to .MKV (plan to have all my video files in that format eventually). Have not messed with the system much yet except to change font to Arial for Japanese language support (wife) and checked a box to hide file extensions. Just to give you an idea of how far along I am...

Have also been playing with two different remotes on a cheap Craig tablet running the latest Android OS. Up in the air over the "official" XBMC release and Yatse since neither is updating my library at the moment...

What I have also been doing is reading up on Life Hacker and here on all the cool things to do and my list grows daily! One subject I can not seem to track down is a suggested file size for movies and TV shows. I get some Japanese shows for my wife that are really small like say 300k and others weighing in at 2GB. What size should I shoot for as I convert them to .MKV?

And what do you suggest for movies (Bluray & DVD)?

Thanks in advance!

[el_cabong]

as far as size goes, it depends on your initial source.

for instance, a full BR in .mkv can be 20+GB, or you can compress it down to >10GB, but obviously quality will suffer as the size gets reduced. if you start with a 300k video, it makes no sense for the conversion to .mkv be more than 300k, as you are limited by the inital quality, so anything bigger wont have any more quality info, will just be bloated.

so for existing files, i would shoot for the same size (but can be smaller as .mkv is most likely better compression than the previous format). For BR/HD DVDs and such, it will depend on how much storage you have, what TV resolution/size you have, and how many movies you want in your collection. obviously, with unlimited space, you could do each rip at full size, but you have to choose whether the space it requires, and how your tv displays it makes it worth it to have the high res video.

I can say one thing from experience, if your going through the trouble to do this now, i would go for the highest quality possible. that way in 5-10 years when you upgrade to a 4k tv or something, the BR rips still look as good as they can, if you rip them from 1080 to 720 for instance to save space, on a 4k set you WILL notice the difference.

[Kib]

I would not convert anything you download. Reconverting will always take the resolution down a notch.

Just download sensible MKV scene releases and keep the stuff you already have / replace with better downloads.

Storage is cheap !