This might not be the best place for this question but I honestly can’t think of another place, but if you know of one please let me know. But I figured someone here might have the experience I’m looking for.
I own the discs for various Star Trek series and everything Stargate. What I’m trying to do is use handbrake to encode them to put them on Plex. But everything I try, it just looks worse. Is there a repository of like recommended settings for various media?
I did the whole Stargate franchise, including Infinity.
My advice is to do what I did. Rip the discs to your hard drive to remove the cd rom as a speed bottleneck. Then start doing tests at different bit rates until you are happy with the quality:size ratio. From season 4 onwards there’s audio commentaries that are worth keeping, so don’t forget to include that audio track as well as any language and subtitles you’d like to keep.
Good luck, have fun. It took me ages to work through it in my free time, but I’m glad I did. Also, from season 8 onwards, there are HD versions of SG-1 that were never released on home video that you may as well find a download of.