Minor update:
I've discovered that video playback quality varies depending on the playback software (decent-but-not-perfect in MPC, poor in VLC), right at the edit point, which seems to indicate a problematic encode. So I'm back to trying to re-encode everything, this time using the x264 command-line, rather than a GUI tool, and things seem to be going a lot more quickly this time around. Hopefully this will get rid of the video hiccup without losing too much quality.
Other than video, the following have been converted over:
- Original English mono
- French, Portuguese, and Japanese dubs (just the BD versions mixed down to stereo and chopped at the edit point, I'm hoping to replace some of these, e.g. with the mono Japanese and maybe mono French dub)
- Commentary tracks (BD versions mixed down to stereo and blended with the English mono at the edit point, I'm hoping for a better mono version of the Gilliam/Jones commentary)
- Subtitles for English, English SDH, Chinese (Traditional), French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai, and English for People Who Don't Like the Film (and not a single line of dialog lost, but a few seconds of dialog don't get displayed properly at the moment in any software I've tested, I'm assuming because of the video glitch)
- Chapter stops
I'm assuming my troubles merging the h.264 video files were due to the fact that they were encoded using different encoders/settings and then spliced together, and that re-encoding everything with the exact same settings will work much better. If anyone has any experience in the matter, feel free to chime in with advice. I'm trying my very best to preserve video quality--I'm currently using vbv-maxrate=25000, crf=1, tune=grain, and preset=veryslow (among others) for my first complete re-encode, and may adjust things if I don't like the results.