Unfortunately quality is entirely subjective. What you may think is fine, I may hate, and vice versa.

Generally speaking, for a given movie, quality and bitrate are linked, but two movies with the same bitrate likely don’t have the same quality because of a myriad of factors.

For me, with a few limited exceptions of movies I know like the back of my hand, I have a really hard time distinguishing between a good 4K webrip (15-20 Mbps) and remux (40-80 Mbps), so I have no issue keeping the majority of my library encoded at ~18Mbps

Unfortunately there’s no quality magic wand, but if you find a release group that does encodes you like, try to get to their home tracker and just let them handle it.

If you’re good with 1080p non-HDR content, for your use case you probably want to focus on “AVC” aka “H.264” or “x264” encodes of decent bitrate. HEVC yields better quality than AVC for a given bitrate, but comes at the cost of being much more intensive to encode and decode, which may be a source of problems for your 10 y.o. box. If your bar is “tell what’s happening”, you can go to pretty low bitrates.

Handbrake is a robust piece of software, but it’s really not beginner friendly because the automatic encoder settings will just absolutely ruin whatever you feed it.

If you’re on windows, check out StaxRip for encoding

But would you still watch anyways? It seems silly to me to watch a game you’re boycotting then just go around pretending you didn’t. Who did you watch for? Who are you actually lying to?

Not sure I understand the boycott but still watch crowd. Sure, not watching makes viewership go down a tick, but the Superbowl is so cultural, every hallway “did you see the game” helps push those viewership numbers right back up