So, I recently ripped all my DVD’s and Blu Ray’s using MakeMkv. Originally I planned on not compressing the files at all, but after I started ripping my Blu Ray discs I realized how quickly it was eating up space on my Nas. So, I started Handbrake to convert them to h.265 as I can direct play them to my Roku devices in my house. I noticed that some of the original Blu Ray rips are encoded with h.264 while others are VC-1. I know I wouldn’t want to re-encode a rip that was already compressed with h.264 to h.265, but what about encoding the original file that was encoded with h.264? Am I going to introduce any lose of quality to the h.265 encoded file?
Every re-encoding introduces quality loss. How much so, depends solely on the parameters you are using to perform the conversion.
Whether the Bluray was using VC-1 or H.264 originally has no relevance after you converted it to H.265.
Keep in mind that you are painting yourself into a corner there. If all your files are in H.265, there is only little chance to stream them remotely or sync them to mobile devices, unless your server has a top-of-the-line CPU.
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welcome to the world of media collectors everywhere.
you can never get back the original bits if you transcode, so if you want a bluray archive, then you need the storage for a bluray archive.
if you are ok with less than bluray, but good enough quality, then you will need to experiment and find the best balance of quality vs size that you can stomach.
As otto mentioned, x265 while can save some space, is really only useful if your clients can direct play, otherwise your plex server will spend a lot of CPU trying to transcode on the fly to clients who can’t direct stream x265.
Thank you for your reply. All of my local devices at home support h265 and I can direct play on. I figured I’d try to get the best quality vs. size I could with h265. I spent some time playing with the settings in handbrake. So, far I happy with the encoded files I’ve made and do not notice a difference and usually pretty picky about how things look. Granted someone else might see differently, but for me it works.
I’ve thought about the remote viewing info. I don’t really see doing that, but I wondered if I could keep a another encoded h264 file compressed in a way to keep the file size smaller than say I would normally in same folder? ( … maybe at 720p or whatever to save space with a single audio track at a lower bit rate)
yes keeping a lower quality for mobile use is an option, however keep in mind that plex does not have very good support for multiple quality files, unless I guess you consider the built-in ‘optimize’ function.
either way, whether you create separate mobile files, it will still take time and effort and additional space.
Or you could just encode to regular 264 and avoid the hassle at the expense of a little bit bigger files.
If you have not directly compared 264 encoded file sizes to 265 encoded files sizes, at comparable visual quality, then I would suggest you do that first.
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