I’ve run your scripts against a number of my media files and have used the settings you’ve suggested for controlling quality and such. I’m seeing potentially a 50% space savings by running my media files through HandBrake for transcoding (which, I believe, is a front-end to ffmpeg).
How can I properly evaluate image quality from the two methods to determine whether or not I actually see a difference and whether that difference is worth one over the other?
My 2016 75" 4K Sony TV does not seem to show me any perceptible difference in quality using the Plex app to play back movies. But there HAS to be a difference somewhere that I can see… So, how do I find it?
I think you really answered your own question but are just looking for confirmation. If you can’t tell the difference on your 75" TV then EITHER would/should be fine to use. So for example if you were talking about testing the CRF value (raising the number) in the scripts to get space savings the logic thing to do is compare two files back to back and view them on your TV.
I like to do this with something like the Transformers movies (scenes where the cars/trucks turn to robots or vice versa). So I’ll take the blu ray rip and crop a 2 to 5 minute action sequence and then re-code this SAME file over and over again with different settings to see what gives me the space savings I want vs picture quality.
By default I ERR on the quality side by a large margin in my scripts. I figure what I encode for my 75" TV that looks fantastic this year will also still look good on my 100" TV 3 years from now.
So, I ripped a chunk of Avatar apart and transcoded three sections using HandBrake, HandBrakeCLI, and Carlo’s scripts. I was not able to join them back together afterward, so I just played them one after another on my 75" TV while standing 18" from it.
Other than the macroblocking that occurred at the very beginning of the chunks, the pictures all looked fine and I could not tell ANY difference in resolution from one to the next.
I need to find a very high quality BluRay that takes place “in real life” (Avatar is all CGI) and has high picture quality as another means of comparison. But, I’m still leaning toward using the HandBrakeCLI transcoding method since it seems to work perfectly well and gives me the best reduction in file size.
@cayars said:
I’ll stand by my comment that hard coded Subtitles are evil. Why have subtitles forced on you if you understand the language being used? If it’s a soft subtitle then it can be turned on or off base on need but it’s never forced on you.
I’ll never, ever do forced/hard subtitles in my scripts.
Agree if we are talking about COMPLETE movie subtitles. I DO encode “foreign” language parts that are not already displaying automatically. All my family and friends who use my server all need those to know what is being said.
I was trying to get the convert.zip from the ftp but it has been down for a couple of days. Has it moved to a different site or has there just been technical difficulties?
@cayars said:
I’ll stand by my comment that hard coded Subtitles are evil. Why have subtitles forced on you if you understand the language being used? If it’s a soft subtitle then it can be turned on or off base on need but it’s never forced on you.
I’ll never, ever do forced/hard subtitles in my scripts.
PS just to clarify for anyone not familiar with this term but it’s when you take the subtitle and superimpose it as graphics right over the video. Think normal TV with network labels that are “burned in”. You can’t remove them or change the subtitle language since they are hard coded or “burned in” and become part of the video itself.
In this day and age it’s easy to extract subtitles and create SRT based subtitles (or download them) so that they can be used or not based on the end user’s wishes. This also gives you the freedom to not have subtitles or use subtitles in many different languages.
Anything “hard coded” is always there and can never be removed once added, thus i call them evil for that reason.
Carlo
The point of the hardcoded subs is that the audio is in a language I don’t understand. I try to keep my library in formats where there is no need to transcode.
@loibi2 said: @cayars do you still use the combination of Drivepool & Snapraid?
Currently I have 2* 4TB and 1 5 TB Disc with my Libraries on which I manually Sync with robocopy to 3 USB Drives of the same size.
If I would go with your Description of Drivepool and Snapraid I could use more Space with even more Security?
Have a look at this on Reddit, it will explain in deep all your possible queries Reddit - Dive into anything
Cheers!
So if I understand correctly I could use 4 4TB Discs for Content and 2 5TB Disc for Parity? and with this 2 Disc can Crash without dataloss?
What do I Need Drivepool for if I dont want to use replication? Only to have 1 Driveletter for all of the 4 Drives?
@loibi2 said: @cayars do you still use the combination of Drivepool & Snapraid?
Currently I have 2* 4TB and 1 5 TB Disc with my Libraries on which I manually Sync with robocopy to 3 USB Drives of the same size.
If I would go with your Description of Drivepool and Snapraid I could use more Space with even more Security?
Have a look at this on Reddit, it will explain in deep all your possible queries Reddit - Dive into anything
Cheers!
So if I understand correctly I could use 4 4TB Discs for Content and 2 5TB Disc for Parity? and with this 2 Disc can Crash without dataloss?
What do I Need Drivepool for if I dont want to use replication? Only to have 1 Driveletter for all of the 4 Drives?
Well Drivepool will create a pool of disk and give you another Disk Letter where you can storage all the files at once and don’t be concern about the balance or location of the files, for example:
You got
Disk a 500gb
Disk b 1tb
Disk c 4tb
Drivepool creates a virtual disk an assign a letter D
So you can path everything on that virtual one
If you want to combine it with snapraid you must choose the biggest disk size available for replication and also better performance
The Reddit post I mentioned before explain it all if you read over the other users comments
@loibi2 said: @cayars do you still use the combination of Drivepool & Snapraid?
Currently I have 2* 4TB and 1 5 TB Disc with my Libraries on which I manually Sync with robocopy to 3 USB Drives of the same size.
If I would go with your Description of Drivepool and Snapraid I could use more Space with even more Security?
Have a look at this on Reddit, it will explain in deep all your possible queries Reddit - Dive into anything
Cheers!
So if I understand correctly I could use 4 4TB Discs for Content and 2 5TB Disc for Parity? and with this 2 Disc can Crash without dataloss?
What do I Need Drivepool for if I dont want to use replication? Only to have 1 Driveletter for all of the 4 Drives?
Well Drivepool will create a pool of disk and give you another Disk Letter where you can storage all the files at once and don’t be concern about the balance or location of the files, for example:
You got
Disk a 500gb
Disk b 1tb
Disk c 4tb
Drivepool creates a virtual disk an assign a letter D
So you can path everything on that virtual one
If you want to combine it with snapraid you must choose the biggest disk size available for replication and also better performance
The Reddit post I mentioned before explain it all if you read over the other users comments
Hope this helps
I got the Point of SnapRaid and Drivepool as Standalone - but why to use Drivepool if you disable Duplication and Balance and have to self Balance Across the Drives? Only the “Big Virtual Drive”?
I’m having an issue where my newly converted mp4 file is getting deleted along with all of the other files. I’m not sure if it’s sonarr doing this or the conversion script. Another problem i’ve seen is that sometimes the sample files or the RARBG intro logo is getting converted instead of the file that needs to be converted.
Please please please help. Where do i find the logs for what the conversion tool is doing?
@carloslozada May you be so Kind to answer my last question? Seems like you know much about the Combination:
I got the Point of SnapRaid and Drivepool as Standalone - but why to use Drivepool if you disable Duplication and Balance and have to self Balance Across the Drives? Only the “Big Virtual Drive”?
@loibi2 said: @carloslozada May you be so Kind to answer my last question? Seems like you know much about the Combination:
I got the Point of SnapRaid and Drivepool as Standalone - but why to use Drivepool if you disable Duplication and Balance and have to self Balance Across the Drives? Only the “Big Virtual Drive”?
Sorry for the delay to answer your question, Yes, basically to have one big drive but I will suggest to keep the balance.
Hope this help.
Carlos
@markbebout said:
Does anyone know of there is another way to grab the converter mentioned by cayars above? The ftp site (ftp://ayars.tv) seems to be inaccessible.
