Advice / Information Requested

[WonkeyDonkey 4]

So I don't have an issue as such with Emby right now, but would appreciate a little advice.  I have converted my entire bluray library using Emby.  I have opted for mkv, with h264 (12 Mbps) and aac audio and all is well.  The output quality is spot on and I really like the conversion options that are available.  Now I'm looking at longer term and considering h265 as an eventual replacement.

So my request is to anybody who has done conversion of bluray content using H265 rather than H264. I would be interested to learn what conversion and quality settings you have used for this.  My current file sizes, using the settings described above, come out at around 10-12Gb per title which is fine.  But everything i have read about H265 suggests upto a 50% reduction in file size for the same/similar quality settings, so my streaming bandwidth would be reduced and this is something I am interested in, as well as moving to the newer format.

Since I have not started converting to H265 yet, I'm interested to learn what settings others may have used or could recommend.

Apologies if this is posted in the wrong area.

Thanks!

[Luke 37068]

Hi, going out on a limb here but I feel like most users ripping from bluray are probably not converting and are ripping using something like MakeMkv to keep the original video intact.

[WonkeyDonkey 4]

Hi Luke, yes I have done the initial rips that way. Mkv's are something I am a big fan of and stick to that container regardless of which formats and bitrates I choose.

It would be nice to settle on some H265 parameters and make that switch though

[roaku 795]

3 hours ago, WonkeyDonkey said:

Hi Luke, yes I have done the initial rips that way. Mkv's are something I am a big fan of and stick to that container regardless of which formats and bitrates I choose.

It would be nice to settle on some H265 parameters and make that switch though

Handbrake has some decent presets for h265 you could use as a starting point or destination.

[Spaceboy 2493]

5 hours ago, WonkeyDonkey said:

Hi Luke, yes I have done the initial rips that way. Mkv's are something I am a big fan of and stick to that container regardless of which formats and bitrates I choose.

It would be nice to settle on some H265 parameters and make that switch though

you missed the point. most of us retain the mkvs as a 1:1 copy of the disc and do not compress them in any way

[roaku 795]

3 hours ago, Spaceboy said:

you missed the point. most of us retain the mkvs as a 1:1 copy of the disc and do not compress them in any way

They didn't miss the point. They're just redirecting back to their original request.

[Gilgamesh_48 943]

3 hours ago, Spaceboy said:

you missed the point. most of us retain the mkvs as a 1:1 copy of the disc and do not compress them in any way

I believe you are projecting your views to many people that do not agree. I NEVER  rip DVDs without enough "compression" to at least get the file down to 2.5gb or so. I have only one mkv that is above 3.0 gb and that one (Lawrence of Arabia) simply starts as big file and is one of the few movies I own that actually suffer from higher compression.

I am NOT saying that "most" people compress files as I do but I very much doubt if "most" people keep file as huge as a 1:1 copy would imply.

If what you mean is that "most" users of MakeMKV do not compress then that may be true but I really know of no one that keeps the huge files that are created by a 1:1 copy.

[Spaceboy 2493]

2 hours ago, Gilgamesh_48 said:

I believe you are projecting your views to many people that do not agree. I NEVER  rip DVDs without enough "compression" to at least get the file down to 2.5gb or so. I have only one mkv that is above 3.0 gb and that one (Lawrence of Arabia) simply starts as big file and is one of the few movies I own that actually suffer from higher compression.

I am NOT saying that "most" people compress files as I do but I very much doubt if "most" people keep file as huge as a 1:1 copy would imply.

If what you mean is that "most" users of MakeMKV do not compress then that may be true but I really know of no one that keeps the huge files that are created by a 1:1 copy.

well.. excluding the OP, its 3:1 in my favour in this thread at present. small sample but its all we have

there are absolutely valid reasons for compressing files. one might be poor eyesight where you can't see the impact of compression... i'm yet to see a compressed file that isnt immediately identifable during any darker scenes of the film. hard no from me

[arrbee99 1560]

I don't compress DVDs, do compress blurays, don't compress 4Ks. This is mostly because DVDs look bad enough to start with, can't tell the difference with blurays (and figure compress by half, get space for movie and a backup), 4Ks, the best should be left alone, and I didn't know it was possible in the beginning and just carried on like that.

No idea about h.265, so I'd just google it. e.g.

https://www.ryananddebi.com/2020/10/04/handbrake-h-265-nvenc-1080p-ripping-chart-and-guidelines/

 

Edited July 24, 2023 by arrbee99

[rotational467 31]

@WonkeyDonkey my ripping method seems to match up with what you are interested in.  Generally I go MakeMKV -> H.265 via HandBrake CLI and x265.  I'm not obsessed with tuning,  my goal is "I don't see any obvious problems when watching on my largest display" in the least possible space with the lowest effort.  Best quality audio track and desired subs are passed through.

99.9% of the time I encode just with the slow preset

-e x265 --encoder-preset slow -q 22.0 --vfr -a 1 -E copy -s 1

For file size reference, after stitching together the two halves of the extended version of Return of the King, the resulting file came in at about 20GB.  Actually just watched it last week, on a 65" display nothing caught my attention.  These aren't any kind of optimal settings and I'm sure this or that could be improved, but for now it's plenty good enough for me.

All that being said, I'm seriously considering getting an Arc card and moving to AV1 in the next year or two when the Emby server gets a hardware refresh.

[WonkeyDonkey 4]

Thanks all, keep em coming

I actually would consider using uncompressed mkv's but the 2 downsides to that for me personally is that you cant burn in forced subs and you are stuck with audio formats that sometimes need to transcode.  The only way to achieve these is to do some kind of conversion as I like to have everything direct play. Unless somebody knows a way to do that without touching the video track quality... Subtitles tracks that are not burned in always cause transcoding to happen here, and thats before even thinking about VC1 and mpeg2video formats.

H265 has got my attention because I have a fairly new large screen tv that handles H265 direct instead of  transcoding and its a newer and more efficient way of doing things.. Space is not too much of a concern right now, nor is encoding time.

I dont compress DVD's here and I have a growing collection of 4K titles although I havent decided how to handle those yet.

I do stream outside of home sometimes, and with my internet, its not enough to handle the uncompressed files too well. So a good quality of compression would help there.

Thanks to all who have contributed so far btw

 

Edited July 25, 2023 by WonkeyDonkey

[ebr 14913]

4 hours ago, WonkeyDonkey said:

you cant burn in forced subs

A lot of these subs are probably available as external SRTs that would not require transcoding to view in just about any client but I understand from the perspective of the original PGS subs.

4 hours ago, WonkeyDonkey said:

and you are stuck with audio formats that sometimes need to transcode

Don't most BDs/DVDs have simple Dolby audio tracks as well as the advanced ones?  You can choose the tracks to include in the target with makemkv.

Add me to the list of no compression.  Ripping is faster and disc space is cheap (relatively speaking).

[Spaceboy 2493]

10 hours ago, WonkeyDonkey said:

I do stream outside of home sometimes, and with my internet, its not enough to handle the uncompressed files too well. So a good quality of compression would help there.

 

this is a valid point and i actually used to retain 1:1 rips at both 1080p and 4k for that purpose. but the improvements in emby transcoding recently mean that retaining only the 4K 1:1 rip and transcoding on those infrequent occasions works out better for me overall than having 2 copies, 4k for local, 1080p for streaming.

for me i saved disk space, you would save the power costs of converting (not to be underestimated). but its a judgement call

[Jammi3D 8]

I moved over to x265 codec a while back mainly because family stream from my server outside of my network. Having only a 20Mbps upload and a quad core cpu it was annoying when I needed to use my server or internet connection to find it is being used elsewhere.

I still have my 1:1 copies for local playback but tbf on a basic 55" smart tv my encodes look good enough not to get complaints.

CRF 18 - 20 is mainly used which results in a 90min movie around 7-10GB depending on dark scenes, grain ect, audio I usually use the DD track rather than re-encode.

Encoding I have my own script in FFMPEG which averages 20FPS on a 5950x so basically real time encoding.

 

[WonkeyDonkey 4]

Thankyou all for the recommendations, Im going to try some of them out and see how I get on.

I ran a test encode for fun, using CRF 14 and very slow profile and it was... very slow!

The output file was 1.4 Gb which seems insane given how good it looked.

I will however use more sane settings moving forward, such as some of those suggested.

Some really good ideas here, thank you all:)

[WonkeyDonkey 4]

A further question: for those who convert standard blurays, do you have tone mapping enabled or disabled ?

Edited July 27, 2023 by WonkeyDonkey

[RanmaCanada 345]

if you're converting a normal bluray, tone mapping is not needed.  If you are going to go forward with this, I would recommend you get an Intel Arc card, and use that to encode your files as you will get superior speed with very good quality.

https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1977195#post1977195

[WonkeyDonkey 4]

Thanks RanmaCanada I'll take a further look at that. Looks like a good read

[tedfroop 33]

On 25/07/2023 at 08:56, ebr said:

Don't most BDs/DVDs have simple Dolby audio tracks as well as the advanced ones?  You can choose the tracks to include in the target with makemkv.

And don't discount how much space the extra audio tracks take up either.  640Kb a second for DD5.1.  So an English, Spanish, and Directors commentary  are 1920kbps of data.  Or roughly 1.2 GB for a 90 minute movie.

On a disk with a DTS5.1, DTS-MA 7.1, Two AC3 5.1 tracks and an AC3 2.0 track you can cut significant bulk from the file size by reducing to one track.  If you have one device that plays high quality and one that plays low - you may get by with the high quality track and allowing your server to remux audio for the lower quality device.

How you primarily listen is the big consideration.  TV speakers - AAC copy of the sound track you want will likely do.   AVR?  Pick the one track you want, likely the High Quality surround track.