I still buy a lot of DVDs and Blu-rays because they’re often the cheapest way to acquire movies — sometimes its even cheaper than renting from iTunes. But that, of course, means that I spend a lot of time ripping and encoding video before I’m able to watch the film in Plex. This piece, by Rob Griffiths, is filled with great information about the presets available in Handbrake and Don Melton’s Video Transcoding. I hadn’t heard of the latter until reading this, but based on the results of his tests, I expect I’ll begin using soon.