Formats ? What formats are best to use ?.... (Quality wise)

[Never_More 19]

I have a question for the masters of all things entertainment - I have over the years collected 3k worth of movies. I have most of the originals to copy to a "better" quality - some blu ray and others DVD format-

 

When I started, I went with 3 different type of formats AVI. Divx. and mkv. - Mostly to save room, at the time I only had 250gb drives (IDE) and as time went by I would buy more 250's - Now days I have upgraded to 4- 4tb drives and my newest is a 8tb drive. with the advice of some of the fine people of the forum I started using drivepool  - I have the money to get 4 more 8TB drives so the room (for me) will be enough to start using a new video "format" if it is needed. The work will be not be a problem I'm retired and have A LOT of time to change over (if needed)

 

What are most useing for their video rips - I see a lot of people with huge systems, 60tb or more. - when I hear the size of space some have, I wonder "what the heck are they storing media wise".

 

Any and all advice is welcome good or bad - :-)

[Luke 42077]

You can have full quality with plain mp4 or mkv. Those are usually the best bet.

[Guest asrequested]

Stick with matroska (MKV) for your container. As for compression, don't unless you have to. If you're going to be using 4K content, HEVC is the way to go. But generally h264 (with minimal compression) in an MKV container.

Edited November 29, 2016 by Doofus

[Deathsquirrel 745]

If storage is not a concern rip to MKV and don't alter anything.  Keep all the audio and subtitle tracks you want.  If space is an issue then MKV, converting the video to H264 at a bit rate you find acceptable and either keeping the HD audio or converting to the format of your choice.

 

What I personally do is rip to MKV and then run through Handbrake to reduce size.  I keep the highest res audio untouched and make a second track that's an AAC copy of that track at the highest supported bit rate.  I burn in foreign language tracks, the kind of subs for things like the few lines of alien dialog in Star Wars flicks for example, or keep the full English subs if I'm not going to watch it in English.

 

I don't use MP4 any longer just because Handbrake won't let me shove some audio formats in that container.

[Never_More 19]

Edited November 29, 2016 by Never_More

[Guest asrequested]

You may want to think about just remuxing some of them instead of a full conversion. You use mkvtoolnix for that. It'll save you some time

[Marc_G 95]

Look into Vidcoder. I believe it is a front end to handbrake and it lets you hatch convert. I used it once to turn about 100 DVD ISO files into mp4 or some such ( was my library of kid titles). Great utility. Vidcoder is found here:

 

http://vidcoder.net/

Edited November 30, 2016 by Marc_G

[Heckler 147]

Personally I do everything in HEVC x265 in an MKV container now... Like you I'm slowly going through almost 2000 movies and 250 TV shows replacing old avi/divx & x264 stuff with HEVC.

 

I can get a far better quality 1080p rip with 5.1 AC3 into the same or smaller filesize than old low quality dvd rips at less than 720p, I'm replacing all my 720p & 1080p slowly with x265 1080p.

 

I used to average 4-8GB for most movies in 720 or 1080p, with the favourites being done only in 1080p and 10-14GB on average.

 

All of those 4-8GB movies are slowly being replaced with HEVC ones in a higher quality, for 3-4GB at a time... the 10-14GB files I have yet to start on due to the time it takes, and the fact that this has been a quality improvement whilst putting off the need for increased storage space.  Currently running around the 16TB mark... a Mix of 2, 3 & 4 TB drives with a 250GB SSD for the OS... But space is now down to roughly 1TB across 5 drives (one has only 46GB left on it, the rest average around 300-400GB.

 

The price of 6TB and upwards drives is still ridiculously high... and being made worse by the state of the UK pound at the moment. 6TB is around the £200 range for a decent quality one. So any way I can stave of a forced upgrade is really great. Replacing a 2TB with a 4TB simply isn't cost effective as even a 4TB drive is still in excess of £115 over here... and prices simply aren't dropping. Those prices have been static for nearly 2 years now... Because I paid £115 for my first 4TB and £108 for the second (replaced a couple of 1.5TB).

 

If anyone has any links to some great deals for the UK... please let me know. A single 6TB to replace my last remaining 2TB, along with doing everything in HEVC could see me with enough storage for a couple more years... as it stands... 3-4 months... 6 tops with some space saving... Because saving all that space isn't enough when you are constantly adding new material.

 

In case you are wondering if the quality holds up at those smaller filesizes... they look beautiful on a 2016 Samsung 43" 4K UHD screen... Haven't tried them on anything bigger yet because I don't have anything larger, and the rooms won't really support a much bigger screen without knocking out the chimney breast or being far to close to a massive screen.

Edited December 2, 2016 by Heckler

[Never_More 19]

You mentioned that you replaced ALOT of drives with bigger. I.e.1tb to 4tb. I'm not the best at advice. But have you taken a look at drive pool. You could pool all the drive's you have into a larger drive. A few members here recommend it to me and the great thing is. The drive's can be any size. It takes all the drive and spread's the info across all drive's. It also shadow copy so if you have a drive fail it will rebuild the information back to a "new" drive or try and fit to your existing pool... If you don't already have it you may want to take a look .. I was able to use a lot of 250gb drives laying around that were replaced with bigger upgrades.

 

Hope it helps.. drive pool. Or drive bender.

[Guest asrequested]

Hope it helps.. drive pool. Or drive bender.

 

Stablebit (drive pool) and Drive Bender

[Never_More 19]

Stablebit (drive pool) and Drive Bender

Thanks Doofus lmao I forget ALOT of stuff.. getting old.

[Guest asrequested]

Thanks Doofus lmao I forget ALOT of stuff.. getting old.

 

All good 

[Heckler 147]

So drive pool and others like it... is basically a raid 5 array?

 

I must admit... the lack of backup does worry me, and when I next upgrade I was planning on a raid 5 array across 5 drives. Was hoping to have at least all 6TB by then... But at a cost of around £1000 for those drives at the moment... never gonna happen.

[Guest asrequested]

So drive pool and others like it... is basically a raid 5 array?

 

I must admit... the lack of backup does worry me, and when I next upgrade I was planning on a raid 5 array across 5 drives. Was hoping to have at least all 6TB by then... But at a cost of around £1000 for those drives at the moment... never gonna happen.

 

It has backup options. It lets you configure how you want it. The biggest difference between pooling and RAID is that one drive doesn't affect all drives. Let's say you don't enable backup and you lose one drive. You only lose the data on that one drive. With backup, you don't lose anything and you have the choice whether to replace the drive or not. It also has a form of striping, should you choose to enable it. This is in Stablebit. I haven't tried Drive Bender

[Happy2Play 9780]

The only backup option with a standard drivepool install is file duplication.  So if you don't have file duplication enabled and a drive fails then you loose everything on that drive.

[Guest asrequested]

And I have striping enabled, so that's also file duplication. So I actually have two backups. And it's all spread over eight drives. A bit overkill, I may adjust that, later.

[Heckler 147]

Looks like I may have to look into this drive pool quickly.... A 3TB drive is failing... CRC errors showing up this evening. It's failed the seatools tests, but passes the SMART test. Cannot be fixed using seagates tools so far... Desperately trying to transfer 2.4TB to various other drives across 2 systems... But I may lose 3-400GB as I don't think I have enough space.

 

Gonna have to order a new drive... bite the bullet and get a 5 or 6TB if the price is right, otherwise another 4TB will have to suffice.

 

I can't use more than 5 drives for it anyway because the MB in my mediaserver has 6 SATA sockets (no free PCI-E slot) and all 6 are in use inc the OS SSD.

 

But losing a 3TB drive is a huge pain in the backside, cannot afford this right before xmas... I've still got £200 bill for the car to pay as that's got a leaking power steering hose and needs a new tyre.

 

 

So does drivepool need a parity drive? so 5 drives would mean the sum total of 4 drives plus the parity... How much free space would I need... current server is 2x 4TB, 1x 3TB 1x 2TB & 1x1.5TB + 250GB SSD for the OS.

 

I had about 1TB left across my movie drives (3 drives totalling 7.5TB) and 1.2TB free across my TV drives (2 drives @ 7TB)

Edited December 7, 2016 by Heckler

[Guest asrequested]

Looks like I may have to look into this drive pool quickly.... A 3TB drive is failing... CRC errors showing up this evening. It's failed the seatools tests, but passes the SMART test. Cannot be fixed using seagates tools so far... Desperately trying to transfer 2.4TB to various other drives across 2 systems... But I may lose 3-400GB as I don't think I have enough space.

 

Gonna have to order a new drive... bite the bullet and get a 5 or 6TB if the price is right, otherwise another 4TB will have to suffice.

 

I can't use more than 5 drives for it anyway because the MB in my mediaserver has 6 SATA sockets (no free PCI-E slot) and all 6 are in use inc the OS SSD.

 

But losing a 3TB drive is a huge pain in the backside, cannot afford this right before xmas... I've still got £200 bill for the car to pay as that's got a leaking power steering hose and needs a new tyre.

 

You can try stablebit free for a month

[aspdend 177]

Personally I do everything in HEVC x265 in an MKV container now... Like you I'm slowly going through almost 2000 movies and 250 TV shows replacing old avi/divx & x264 stuff with HEVC.

 

I can get a far better quality 1080p rip with 5.1 AC3 into the same or smaller filesize than old low quality dvd rips at less than 720p, I'm replacing all my 720p & 1080p slowly with x265 1080p.

 

I used to average 4-8GB for most movies in 720 or 1080p, with the favourites being done only in 1080p and 10-14GB on average.

 

All of those 4-8GB movies are slowly being replaced with HEVC ones in a higher quality, for 3-4GB at a time... the 10-14GB files I have yet to start on due to the time it takes, and the fact that this has been a quality improvement whilst putting off the need for increased storage space.  Currently running around the 16TB mark... a Mix of 2, 3 & 4 TB drives with a 250GB SSD for the OS... But space is now down to roughly 1TB across 5 drives (one has only 46GB left on it, the rest average around 300-400GB.

 

The price of 6TB and upwards drives is still ridiculously high... and being made worse by the state of the UK pound at the moment. 6TB is around the £200 range for a decent quality one. So any way I can stave of a forced upgrade is really great. Replacing a 2TB with a 4TB simply isn't cost effective as even a 4TB drive is still in excess of £115 over here... and prices simply aren't dropping. Those prices have been static for nearly 2 years now... Because I paid £115 for my first 4TB and £108 for the second (replaced a couple of 1.5TB).

 

If anyone has any links to some great deals for the UK... please let me know. A single 6TB to replace my last remaining 2TB, along with doing everything in HEVC could see me with enough storage for a couple more years... as it stands... 3-4 months... 6 tops with some space saving... Because saving all that space isn't enough when you are constantly adding new material.

 

In case you are wondering if the quality holds up at those smaller filesizes... they look beautiful on a 2016 Samsung 43" 4K UHD screen... Haven't tried them on anything bigger yet because I don't have anything larger, and the rooms won't really support a much bigger screen without knocking out the chimney breast or being far to close to a massive screen.

@@Heckler - out of interest, I am currently looking to upgrade my very ageing htpc and at the same time want a high spec machine to convert my library of h.264 (and older avi/divx stuff) to HEVC. As I have just had to buy a new 6Tb HDD for my server I am keen to reduce file sizes like you have been doing but as I jut picked up a 4k HDR capable TV in the sales I want the best quality rips to serve it with. When you convert a h.264 mkv to h.265 mkv - are you just re-encoding using handbrake and, if so, is there any loss in quality? I really don't want to dig out my disks and go through them all if I can just adjust the existing mkv rips and keep them as high quality as possible. I accept that my older stuff I will have to get the disks out and encode these properly, but that's what you get for being stupid when younger and not thinking these things through...

[Heckler 147]

@@Heckler - out of interest, I am currently looking to upgrade my very ageing htpc and at the same time want a high spec machine to convert my library of h.264 (and older avi/divx stuff) to HEVC. As I have just had to buy a new 6Tb HDD for my server I am keen to reduce file sizes like you have been doing but as I jut picked up a 4k HDR capable TV in the sales I want the best quality rips to serve it with. When you convert a h.264 mkv to h.265 mkv - are you just re-encoding using handbrake and, if so, is there any loss in quality? I really don't want to dig out my disks and go through them all if I can just adjust the existing mkv rips and keep them as high quality as possible. I accept that my older stuff I will have to get the disks out and encode these properly, but that's what you get for being stupid when younger and not thinking these things through...

 

I'm not re-encoding files I already have in h264 into h265... I'm replacing it entirely in h265 with a new encode from a far better source... If you are going to simply re-encode a low bitrate h264 into h265 then you're not going to see any quality improvement at all... in fact you'll see degradation unless the source is of such a high quality that it compensates. If your original h264 rip is around the 10+GB mark then I'd say you can get as good a picture for around the 3-4GB mark.  But seeing as I only have my fave movies in sizes above the 8GB range, and average movies typically around the 4-6GB range, and below that is the stuff I'm not that bothered about. I've still got a few dozen DVD rips around the 1GB mark... but I replace these as I see them become available from various sources... I class those as a backup of things I've already purchased.  

 

I recently replaced my original star trek movies with h265 and dropped those 6 movies from 8-10GB each to 3-4GB each, whilst actually improving some from 5.1 to 7.1 sound. If anything I think the picture quality is better now that before.

 

In some cases it's actually quicker to download a fresh source than it is to rip from disc again or re-encode a very large source file... But then you often find that you get stuck with 5.1 or 7.1 AAC instead of AC3 or DTS. For some AAC is fine, but I simply prefer DTS if it's available and AC3 (Dolby digital) if there's no DTS source. AAC is for things I'm not that fussed about, or will suffice for TV shows.

 

I don't actually have anything ripped in 4k... I don't even own any 4K blurays... But I have played 1080p stuff on a Samsung 4K TV and it's upscaling it beautifully in my opinion. I even tested it with a low bitrate H264 (think yify quality, so very poor with crappy sound) and it looked better on a 43" TV than it did on my 27" monitor.

 

At the moment I'm having to stream direct from the PC to the TV because the tizen emby app isn't yet available over here in the UK.

 

Trial and error is what it takes sometimes. I spent years playing around with ripping DVD's I bought in the early 2000's and it was time consuming... nowadays I can download a BD rip of something I own quicker than I can rip it from disc and encode into h264/5. Thankfully I have fibre, a VPN and an ISP that doesn't mind if I burn through 500GB or more in a month. 

Edited December 12, 2016 by Heckler