New to the Forum and Overwhelmed

[Qwik]

Good Evening All,
I have been lurking the forums for some time on a subject of interest. However, the more I read, the more confused I get, so I am hoping for some aid or scolding where appropriate so I can learn. Yes, I feel I have done enough searching to post these questions as again, overwhelmed by the amount of information:

While I have been fooling around with DVDFab since version 4, I have never really tried to master the full potential of the program.

I have recently been blessed with a home theater system with a 96" screen and a wonderful Mitsubishi Diamond projector.

My question, even though searching the site has confused more than help, deals with the proper transcoding of video (.mp4 as my norm) so that I attain the best resolution to replay my DVDs on the big screen to their utmost.

The other question deals with the fact that at 47 years young, I am a tremendous anime' fan and for those few encodes that I've done, I'm not happy with the results.

Currently, all DVDs, widescreen and the anime 4:3s have been coded via the PS3 setting with the bitrate at 3000 and using the max resolution selected by DVDFab. No subtitles and using 5.1 sound where available and the next best if the movie doesn't support it.

Once the encode has been accomplished, I'm currently sending the completed DVDs to an HTPC that is connected to my home theater and using VLC to view the output. I know I'll get scolded for this but being new to all of this, I really need some guidance. BTW... I do have an HP MediaSmart 495 that I back all my videos to but got very confused in setting up Twonky, thus I haven't attempted to Stream my movies.

Any help, comments, yelling or scolding is greatly appreciated. Just too much information overload for this old man. LOL

Thanks
Qwik AKA Jim

[IPopov50]

Jim,
Congrats with you state of the art home theater.
And here is your first mistake. You are using profiles and presets targeted for mobile devices. Your home theater I guess, isn't one of them.
Mobile devices usually are very limited in framerate and/or bitrate, screen size and so on. Besides, on a inch by two screen anything will looks sharp and colorfull.
With your sizes you would need all bitrate you can get. So, best container for you or anybody is MKV.
Depends on your storage, streaming and player capabilities you can go as crazy full copy of your BD/DVDs without any loss in quality (and size!) in ISO format or more reasonable as remuxed MKV - no loss in quality, but extraction of main movie. These two I would recommend. However, if storage is consideration, you should compress your content, and "mkv.h264.audiocopy" is way to go. However, bitrate/filesize you can only chose by experimenting and getting it "just right" for you.

[Qwik]

IP,
Thank you for the information!! Fortunately, I have not encoded too many of my vids as of yet hoping to find someone to bounce questions on. I will execute those pieces of advice you mentioned.

Thx
Jim

[Complication]

Currently, all DVDs, widescreen and the anime 4:3s have been coded via the PS3 setting with the bitrate at 3000 and using the max resolution selected by DVDFab.

Make sure you are not bumping the resolution past the DVD source (~720). Cranking it higher will not help the encode quality and may cause other problems.