this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
33 points (92.3% liked)

Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

53948 readers
360 users here now

⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.

Rules • Full Version

1. Posts must be related to the discussion of digital piracy

2. Don't request invites, trade, sell, or self-promote

3. Don't request or link to specific pirated titles, including DMs

4. Don't submit low-quality posts, be entitled, or harass others



Loot, Pillage, & Plunder


💰 Please help cover server costs.

Ko-FiLiberapay


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

After a recent data loss, I'm reconsidering various CODECs before re-encoding my re-pirated "loot". I'm looking to maintain a good balance between quality and file size as my previous files were HUGE. I've read about x264, h264, h265 & vp9 for video and it's between AAC or AC-3 for audio. I'm looking for long-term and broad device compatibility. Also, I'll be using FFBatch front-end for ffmpeg for re-encoding. So, fellow pirates, what are your libraries coded in? Any helpful input would be greatly appreciated.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

AV1 is only just appearing in TV chipsets, and software support and stability will lag behind there for some time. if you only use your videos on a modern PC or a new-ish phone, then sure go for it, it's pretty great.

Personally though, as good as AV1 is, I'd be avoiding it for something like a plex/emby/jellyfin library purely because while computers and phones now have decent support, many TVs and streaming boxes do not, the software on those that do is lacking support or is patchy, broken or unstable, and you can run into difficulty even transcoding those files for playback on unsupported devices because of the transcoder backends having their own support problems depending on your server hardware, operating system, and server software choice.

H265 10bit is the current best for those sorts of media libraries, just about any TV or streaming box from the last 5 years will support it just fine and it is still somewhat easy to encode with hardware acceleration.

I recently ran some of my less critical libraries through fileflows to convert a small subset of oversized H264 files to H265 10bit and with roughly 17000 files processed in those libraries I've saved about 5tb. that is skipping small H264 files and files already in H265, and has a few encoding tiers based on file size and some handling of reprocessing outputs that end up larger than the original, which can happen with the lower RF values that I am using.

Output quality has been perfectly acceptable, but i still have many thousands of files that I would prefer to keep in the highest quality possible, regardless of file size.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I see what you mean about the other CODECs like VP9 and AV1. The future looks good for them but for a Plex library not so much. I tried converting a single ~20 minute TV episode and it took about ~16mins for AOM-AV1 and VP9 was somewhat over an hour or so. But, H265 zips right along in ~5 mins or less an ep with not as much strain on the CPU. Probably be going down the H265/AAC route. Thanks for the data & information. It's helped very much!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That will be down to your GPU having hardware acceleration for certain codecs and not others, because a pure CPU encode of those codecs on anything but an Epyc or other ball tot he wall top end CPU is going to take hours.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

My Radeon 470 had Kronos Open CL but I think some of my system drivers have gone crazy because the option to use it has disappeared. I'm really considering a new build even though my system's only 3.5 yrs old.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Can you encode H265 10bit using the amf_h265 in ffmpeg? I hope I'm using the right terminology?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yep, this. This is why I'm still favoring HEVC over AV1 or even VP9 right now: player compatibility and ease of Jellyfin transcoding.