How to best encode Dragon Ball Z from the Dragon Box DVDs?

[Adam Cole]

So I finally got all the Dragon Ball Z Dragon Box DVDs and want to preserve them in digital format. The DVDs use SD resolution and 4:3 aspect ratio and retain the noise from the original film roll. When encoding, I want to retain the original quality as much as possible, with colors, noise, sharpness etc all intact. So far I extracted all raw video from the DVDs and each episode is about 1 GB large. Do you have any suggestions how to encode them to make the file size smaller and preserve the exact or near-exact DVD picture quality? I tried Handbrake and while the episodes became smaller in file size, the quality was not exactly as good as the source. No idea if I should go for x265 (the options overwhelm me) or if x264 is enough. Any help is greatly appreciated.