What codecs/container do you save as your primary?

[Spaceboy 2493]

8 minutes ago, rbjtech said:

My light bulb moment was doing the analysis that 98% of my 'media' was sitting there 'idle' while consuming power and sitting on relatively expensive disk.   Lets be real here, a 16Tb disk is not what I would call 'inexpensive' .. and when you add them all up + backup's - it's a lot of money..

Storage 'Tiering' is something I'm also looking at - and for 'archive' media - moving it to HDD powered down arrays on older lower capacity disks, leaving the newer high density drives (but much fewer of them) spinning for stuff that is < 1 year old or 'continuing  in Emby' and SSD for the 'current' media (< 3 Months old).  Maybe unrelated to the thread - but in the debate about how the heck we store all this media - I think it's another area that warrants some thought ?

yeah the recent electricity price increases have not been pleasant

[tedfroop 33]

22 hours ago, HawkXP71 said:

Ive been holding off for the next major release of ffmpeg to play with av1, as the non-hardware encoding is just too slow compared to hevc.

 

Been playing with it because I always get some really odd artifacting with H265 and animation.  When there's lots of motion the linework goes fuzzy (turns from a line to dots really), and there are other odd effects in scenes with lots of horizontal line work.  I have been able to minimize it but if I am re ripping stuff....is there something better?

So far - with a few exceptions I have found AV1 better generally for animation than H265.  Some early (1940 and earlier Looney Tunes) shows odd effects but production wasn't what it is now either, and its just a few shorts that have problems.

As for the wrapper for AV1 there are some significant differences in audio between Webm and mp4 as far as audio.  Webm allows use of Vorbis or Opus audio streams - which isn't a deal breaker when dealing with mono or stereo sources as Vorbis is to me, one of the best compression formats .  MP4 wrapper allows adding pass through audio streams without compression, which is preferred.

Because it's my library I use a single (usually best quality, uncompressed audio stream and unless there are "other" reasons (Hot Fuzz Fuzz Facts) for a subtitles track, I don't usually add them.

Edited April 21, 2023 by tedfroop

[Deathsquirrel 741]

For those looking to convert their media to avoid transcoding, just get a Shield or comparable playback device.  I don't know what value you put on your time but not matter the rate, it 'll surely add up to more than the cost of a new player that eliminates transcoding very, very quickly.

[HawkXP71 99]

5 minutes ago, Deathsquirrel said:

For those looking to convert their media to avoid transcoding, just get a Shield or comparable playback device.  I don't know what value you put on your time but not matter the rate, it 'll surely add up to more than the cost of a new player that eliminates transcoding very, very quickly.

While I agree, and did that for my home and primary "away from home" location.  I have users (family) who I cant "force" to do this  Also, this doesnt remove the need for transcoding due to bandwidth.  

[tedfroop 33]

On 02/05/2023 at 11:03, HawkXP71 said:

While I agree, and did that for my home and primary "away from home" location.  I have users (family) who I cant "force" to do this  Also, this doesnt remove the need for transcoding due to bandwidth.  

Yes.  And server horsepower to serve those users....

So I have been playing with AV1.  So far quality is very good and as you can see on BluRay rips about half the bandwidth is DTS MA audio.  Very manageable stream size....

Just hoping to get a faster method of encoding soon......

Edited May 29, 2023 by tedfroop

[rbjtech 4265]

7 hours ago, tedfroop said:

Yes.  And server horsepower to serve those users....

So I have been playing with AV1.  So far quality is very good and as you can see on BluRay rips about half the bandwidth is DTS MA audio.  Very manageable stream size....

Just hoping to get a faster method of encoding soon......

So why keep the HD Audio - it's now the same size as the Video

If you have reduced a 30-40Mbit/sec (1080p remux source) Video to 4Mbit/sec - you have lost a lot of detail - AV1 is not THAT good lol - to match it, something like EAC3 7.1 would be in the 1Mbit/sec range - saving you another 3Mbit/sec - total source now @ 5Mbit/sec instead of 8.   If 8 was your target, then personally I would do video @ 7 and audio at 1.  You may consider Audio fidelity this important - and that is of course perfectly fine !   Just some observations..

 

[tedfroop 33]

19 hours ago, rbjtech said:

So why keep the HD Audio - it's now the same size as the Video

If you have reduced a 30-40Mbit/sec (1080p remux source) Video to 4Mbit/sec - you have lost a lot of detail - AV1 is not THAT good lol - to match it, something like EAC3 7.1 would be in the 1Mbit/sec range - saving you another 3Mbit/sec - total source now @ 5Mbit/sec instead of 8.   If 8 was your target, then personally I would do video @ 7 and audio at 1.  You may consider Audio fidelity this important - and that is of course perfectly fine !   Just some observations..

 

Like I said playing with it.....at present my ability to encode is quite limited.  I was in fact watching for the first time and will switch files back as you are correct and I found it washed out and color was weird in places.

It's ok for blocky stuff with solid colors like modern animation,  but yeah when it gets more complex like Looney Tunes theatrical cartoons its not great.

New more capable hardware is on the near horizon and I will play around with it more then. 

I am musically inclined and compressed music bugs me - it does the same as video - removes definition and dynamics.  I am musically inclined (grade 8 Royal conservatory Violin, and piano, History, Harmony etc.) so I hear compression like you see it.......

[tedfroop21 38]

On 29/05/2023 at 03:23, rbjtech said:

You may consider Audio fidelity this important - and that is of course perfectly fine !   Just some observations..

Now I have me new laptop and have played around with all kinds of codecs and played them on my new 4k tv I have one simple observation

Good video quality in any file, no matter the compression codec IS THE SAME SIZE AS H264.   Amazing stuff I know but .....   Yeah.....

There are times when compression is OK,  like say a 1970's TV Show shot on tape,  where quality is limited in some ways anyway.  But for anything shot on film, with good transfer to disk,  ripping at original DVD resolution,  it's the same size when quality is good....   Plus my problem with modern animation is gone with h264.  The way h265 compression leaves artifacts and all my trying searching found no way to get rid of the occasional solid lines going broken (from ------------ to - - - - - -)

 

So all around the circle and back to the start........