Is HEVC (8-bit)/AAC a good, modern CODEC combination for rebuilding & reducing my library size without compromising quality? Helpful feedback would be appreciated.
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If you’re concerned about quality, re-encoding from a lossy format to another lossy format is always going to lose more quality. Even if the format you choose would have been better quality if it was encoded directly from the source, the result is almost certainly going to look worse than what you have now.
Exactly this, avoid re-encoding at all costs. Giant hard drives are real cheap these days
Certified refurbished drives. They’re less reliable than new, but a hell of a lot cheaper. I’ve been running my Plex on a 14 TB.
Just beware of the sound levels of some of those drives.
Definitely, unless the original source was very inefficiently compressed, it’s not worth the time, effort and quality loss to save a small amount of space.
Yeah it’s fine I reencoded almost my entire library into that as soon as my devices were able to play it.
But if you can wait a couple more years AV1 will be better
If they can wait a couple more years I’m sure that in that time they’ll save up enough money to get a new HDD/SSD so there’s no need to reencode
But if they expand their storage in the meantime then re-encode later, they’ll have even more space freed up. Something about stonks, I guess 🤷🏻♂️
It just might not be worth the quality loss. Though if space is tight then it’s tight
Some people priortise library quantity over image quality and with the standard living room setup of ~50" and 8-10’ gap between screen and sofa, a small decrease in quality would be negligible anyway.
While I tend to avoid encoding wherever possible, I use H265 10Bit at low RF to archive non-critical libraries (old TV shows in some users personal libraries, 1080p movies more than 1 year old and over 20gb etc…).
my average size reduction going from a 1080p Bluray remux of 35-40gb is about 50% with no significant effect to image quality. High action or high grain movies end up a bit larger, slower movies with no action and most animations compress a bit smaller. works well overall.
basically any modern device can decode them and the image quality tends to be a bit better than 8bit.
I’d like to go with AV1, but very few of my client devices can decode it, so its not worth the trouble to save a few percent,
I have a problem with 10-Bit though. When I try to encode more than 1 file in 10-Bit with the HEVC_AMF ffmpeg encoder, my CPU usage goes to 100% and stays. And with 1000s of files to do. Well, you can imagine. Ugh!
Sounds like a bug in the encoder perhaps. I dont have that issue with my setup, but I’m not using AMD GPUs
I don’t know if you want to talk specifically about codec settings but it seems overall the compression quality goes AV1 > HEVC/h265 > h264. So if you have the time and/or hardware go for AV1, otherwise HEVC will be perfectly fine. I don’t know of any situations which calls for h264 nowadays.
The only reason that comes to mind to use x264 is to avoid transcoding for older clients. Also Firefox does not support HEVC so it always needa transcoding (at least on Jellyfin)
I disagree, I think HEVC has better overall compression quality than AV1. But it’s also wrapped up in licensing problems so AV1 can be more compatible especially if you’re using windows
I am sure I am in the minority, but avoid AAC multi channel encodes as much as possible. It really makes no sense for anyone. Most home theater equipment does not support it. AC3 or eAC3 are supported by nearly every device natively. AAC does not work over SPDIF or HDMI ARC without reencoding. All that for a slightly lower bitrate? No thanks. Plus most are likely encoded from a AC3 or eAC3 so they will sound worse than the native version.
