I managed to make an MKV with the new 81 crawl, but it came out to a total of 20.3 GB. I used Handbrake, with video set to lossless with no crop, and the audio set to passthru (I used all 3 DTS-HD tracks from DeEd 2.7 for consistency). The starting file was 33.9 GB. It looks good from what I’ve checked, I can’t really detect a difference without going side by side, but I’m not sure why I got so much smaller a file.
JEDIT: I did a screenshot comparison and it looks like my MKV softened the grain a bit. I’m not sure what I did wrong though.
Well, re-encoding and reducing the bitrate will lose detail including grain. If it was actually lossless in handbrake, the resulting file would be enormous.
This is why people have tried to make MKVs without re-encoding, though clearly it gets messy trying to append the crawl cleanly.