[QUOTE=SeeMoreDigital;174589]Unless you're cropping away any black mattes that may exist in your DVD source. I recommend that you keep the original height resolution, ie: 480 for NTSC or 576 for PAL[/QUOTE]
What i am working with at the moment is tv-show DVD's with 4:3 image. On those i want to keep the original pixel size 100% intact.
The other thing about encoding to h264 MKV, is also that the progressive scan that is being done instead, deals with interlacing errors that there can be on these elder DVD releases of tv-shows, which i have noticed that something like meny of the Xena episodes are suffering of on DVD, but where progressive takes care of it.
The bitrate of being able to set them higher, is for being able to keep the original bitrate on the DVD's mostly intact, where i do have DVD's who has a bitrate just above 5000 kbps.
I'm just a guy who naturally also wants the rips i do, to be in a perfect quality, i do also have plenty of storage space for it on the 3TB USB drive i have entirely dedicated for tv-shows.