I would hate to have to go back and re-encode my entire library over to AV1 sigh lol… 3500 movies, 45,000 tv episodes, with 85% of the library in 1080p, and about 5% in 4K HDR, all encoded in H.265… That will be such a loooong process… Especially considering I won’t have hardware encoding support like I do from my 1070Ti right now.
That’d take a while, yeah. But systematising reencodes is a good idea, working through things in batches. I’ve just gone through a few thousand TV episodes myself. It’s brutal.
Here’s what I did to work around the problem:
To fix AV1 files already in Plex:
I downloaded MediaInfo from
https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo/Download/
MediaInfo lets me quickly scan MANY files (whole folders and subfolders) all at once to see what codecs they use. It’s MUCH easier than going through all my video files one by one with either Plex or VLC to check the codecs.
Then I used MediaInfo with View set to Sheet (not basic, not tree) and opened my folder Movies
When it listed the 1445 files it found, I then selected all of them at once (to get ready to export the data) by selecting the top file, scrolling to the bottom, then hold the shift key and click on the last file. All should be highlighted as selected.
Then use Export and export the entire list to a CSV file. Don’t worry about where the columns land.
Then open that CSV file in (free) LibreOffice (which will import it to SCALC.exe spreadsheet.
Once there, you can use Find to locate “AV1” and see which files you need to fix.
I was lucky and only needed to fix 3 files so I ran them one at a time through Handbrake with the output format set to HEVC from the Matroska 1080x30 presets.
I have also used Handbrake to do this same conversion on the largest of my movie files. It reduced a 23GB movie to 3.8GB with no loss of quality. But my video card isn’t new enough to assist with HEVC encoding and the CPU runs at 99% the whole time it’s converting a movie which often takes one or more hours. Plex on my Roku, phone, and PC have no problem with HEVC.
(By my personal choice, I also added [HEVC] to the output filename to avoid later confusion.)
Then I told Plex to delete the file that was in AV1 format.
Then I moved the new HEVC format file into the Plex > Movies folder and told Plex to update the libraries.
To AVOID this problem in the future with downloads from YouTube, I got the Firefox addon called h264ify from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/
Hopefully, I won’t get any more AV1 files from YouTube.
For things that YouTube seems to disallow downloading, I also bought and often use 4kdownloader from here https://www.4kdownload.com/
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