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.
Thanks for the clarification on 264. I have an AMD 3700x with Radeon 470 graphics card. I’d like a decent balance between CPU/GPU encoding so not to put too much stress on just the CPU. I know nothing about AV1. Can Smart TVs read the AV1 or VP9 codec? I know my LG will take H.264 & H.265 but I haven’t tried the others?
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.
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!
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.
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.
Yep, this. This is why I’m still favoring HEVC over AV1 or even VP9 right now: player compatibility and ease of Jellyfin transcoding.
Can you encode H265 10bit using the amf_h265 in ffmpeg? I hope I’m using the right terminology?
I am not too knowledgeable on different encoders, but I don’t know if using cpu and gpu is an option. Av1 and vp9 are open standards, meaning basically anything can implement them, but av1 is new so older devices haven’t. The tv will probably handle vp9 fine, but I would still recommend transcoding a test video and looking if it plays back natively. With that gpu av1 is definitely not supported so I would recommend vp9.