Emby Conversion vs. Alternative Software

[EkoOne 5]

Out of curiosity, in terms of video quality is there any benefit to using Emby's built-in video conversion tool vs. one of the myriad 3rd Party software options available? I've used Emby to convert 4K HEVC to mobile-friendly 4K H.264 without issue but was wondering if other software options might provide even better quality output for mobile devices. Or is it all academic?

[rbjtech 5284]

3rd party options will certainly give you many more options but at the end of the day - you are watching it on a mobile screen, unless emby is doing a REALLY poor job, I would not expect you to see any differences.  I would hedge a bet that a decent 1080p encode would look just as good at half the filesize ...

[Q-Droid 989]

It's not so much the quality but the lack of control which in turn results in lower quality. Overall the built in conversion does a good job but you don't have the fine-tuning options available in tools. For example an Emby conversion to a lower bitrate will sometimes take a 1080p source down to 480p or 576p when the target bitrate could easily handle 720p.

[EkoOne 5]

Thank you both.

I value the additional control a dedicated converter provides even if the potential gain is negligible and it's less convenient than allowing Emby to handle everything. It would also be nice to avoid overzealous downsizing as Q-Driod points out.

My main goal when mobile viewing is avoiding transcoding and in that regard Emby's built-in tool works perfectly fine for creating friendly files. That being said, any additional quality I can squeeze out from a dedicated app while keeping the file size down would certainly be a plus.

[rbjtech 5284]

1 minute ago, EkoOne said:

My main goal when mobile viewing is avoiding transcoding ...

In that case - also make sure you have converted Audio to 2 channel AAC or MP3 - as any form of HD Audio, DTS and maybe even AC3 could trigger transcoding depending on the client.  

[EkoOne 5]

A very good point, thank you.