I use CRF for everything and I’ve noticed there is a big difference in big city based locations vs “nature” locations. Shows like Hawaii Five-O or Magnum P.I. or MacGyver that regularly feature trees everywhere will frequently be 1,100 MB or larger in size while shows like Bull or The Black List often come in under 800 MB or so.
12 new items a day - is a slow day.
The ‘Goal’ is to acquire more stuff than you could ever watch - so when the Zombie Apocalypse/Space Alien Invasion/Trump Impeachment occurs, society breaks down and there is nothing coming in - ur set.
(use headphones tho- zombies and politicians are attracted to sound).
You’ll be sorry one day - with your watch and delete, without a thought to the future. The Dark, Dead, Smelly Future.
You might be over estimating the amount of free time you’ll have if society breaks down. On the other hand, an archive of TV shows might give a bit of “currency” to trade once society starts to stabilize again.
You might be underestimating the paranoia-fueled planing - the hording of media, and instant mashed potatoes, being the last two things on the list…lol
About 17 accounts encompassing 20-30 users (4 generations) all with with different tastes 
(My Family is large and spread across the US and South East Asia). Since I’m the geek with the Computer and Hardware fetish with Gigabit internet, I host the server, rather than have 12 different servers and have to teach them how to do what it is I do…
Fast internet upload speeds is something I only dream about.
I’m the geek in my family, but I also live in a city with only 2 Mbps upload speeds. So basically no one outside the house gets to benefit directly from my expertise at the moment.
Well, that’s unfortunate… My ISP is talking about going 10Gbit soon, if they do I will probably get that and start also sharing with the other side of my family in Europe (We’re all Dutch-Indonesian Heritage).
I can confirm that this setting makes The Three Stooges look better than the source. Looks like I have a lot of re-encoding to do.
Was Monty Python’s Flying Circus originally shot on film? I tried this with Sanford and Son and saw no difference, so I’m wondering if it doesn’t work well on shows shot on videotape, or if the video quality of Sanford is worse than most shows released on DVD.
Oh, wow. I had to dig deep in the vault for that one. It’s like trying to remember the name of someone you went to grade school with.
This isn’t accurate. It might be accurate for your setup, but I only use CQ and I can direct play.
Apparently everyone’s right, fwiw. Netflix customizes their encodings more than just setting one ABR for 4k, one for 1080p, etc. They do it per movie/episode. Isn’t that incredible?
I guess if you can build an essentially unlimited processing farm, then running CQ on a movie, then using the average bitrate it comes up with as a basis for your 2-3-pass ABR makes sense.
You can set a “vbv-maxrate” and “vbv-bufsize”:
How should you set the bufsize? This depends on how much variability you want in the bitrate. A good default is to have the buffer size be twice as large as the maximum rate, but suggestions may vary depending on the streaming setup. If your client buffer is smaller (in the order of just a few seconds), your bufsize should be around the same size as the maxrate. If you want to constrain your stream’s bitrate, try setting bufsize to half of the maximum rate or less.
When you apply VBV to CRF encoding, the trick is to find a CRF value that, on average, results in your desired maximum bitrate, but not more. If your encode always “maxes out” your maximum bitrate, your CRF was probably set too low. In such a case the encoder tries to spend bits it doesn’t have. On the other hand, if you have a high CRF that makes the bitrate not always hit the maximum, you could still lower it to gain some quality. For example, you encode at CRF 18 without VBV. Your clip ends up with an average bitrate of 3.0 Mbit/s. But your want your VBV setting to cap the clip at 1.5 Mbit/s, so you need to lower your CRF to about 24 to only get half the bitrate.
My use-case doesn’t require an ABR or capped bitrate, but it might be worth trying for y’all ABR folks.
Also, in a way, adjust the “Level” setting can raise/lower/exert more control over bitrates, because two of the options that get adjusted at different levels are the vbv-maxrate and vbv-bufsize. So in a way I guess most of y’all are already using that setting (just not intentionally).
But obviously but changing the numbers yourself you can exert more control. Maybe you can squeeze a bit more out on the quality size, while not sacrificing your precious TBs (I’m picturing y’all swimming through a sea of hard drives, Scrooge McDuck style).
I actually just deleted my Handbrake logs from some comparisons I was doing. I kept it pretty conservative, using the 1080p30 MKV h265 preset, which uses a CRF of 22. I also use 22 for my h264 stuff, and… it looked really good in h.265.
What I mean is, the out of the box h265 MKV at CRF 22 seemed to be pretty equivalent to my own custom h264 preset, with vastly less effort in terms of experimenting with settings. And a smaller file. So I found that really impressive.
Quality-wise I found it very hard to distinguish between the two, using Princess Mononoke as a source.
My main living room device is a TiVo and a Roku 3, neither of which can handle HEVC, so I’ll be sticking with h264. But IMO you can just stick with the CRF you already like (since presumably we settled on a quality we like) and then enjoy the gains in terms of smaller filesizes.
I’d definitely like to read it, but I couldn’t find a link in your text. Any chance you can still share it?
As long as we’re sharing our opinions on settings, I wrote a novel on it here:
Keeping in mind that I am also an advocate of finding what works best for you individually, except I think people should start with faster and lower quality presets than they think they want, and then adjust accordingly if they can actually tell the difference in the end result.
I couldn’t be sure from context, but do you mean easier as in easier to setup for batch encodings?
Handbrake CLI has a setting for importing a GUI JSON preset from GUI. So you can tweak/experiment/learn all the settings to your heart’s content in the GUI Handbrake, then export your preset to a JSON file, and import it when you run a CLI command.
Incidentally, if that is what you’re doing, any desire to share what your setup is? Do you have some sort of folder monitoring setup?
Would you mind talking more about how you’ve set this up? I’m just starting to get interested in RAID type NAS setups. Albeit on a smaller scale, like let’s say 8tb.
If you’re using a RAID, my mind boggles at how many HDDs you must have.
I am setup with RAID 0, I use 5 of the ports on my motherboard and use it’s RAID Controller for one of the arrays, and then I also have an 8 port SAS/SATA RAID controller card that’s setup through it for the other array. The reason I use RAID 0 is because I also pay for backblaze. Unlimited Internet backup for $6/month, though when I started my plan it was $5/month, so I guess I am grandfathered in to a lower price. Once I’ve switched out all of my drives to 16TB Drives, I will probably pick-up another RAID controller and add a 3rd array.
Eventually, I will have 16TB x 21 drives giving me 336 unformatted TB. Once formatted it will likely end up around the 300TB mark I think. What specifically did you want to know?
This is all in my main PC at the moment, here’s the specs:
Chassis: Cooler Master - Cosmos II 25th Anniversary Edition
Processor: AMD Ryzen 2700x
Motherboard: MSI x470 Gaming Pro
RAM: 64GB Corsair Vengeance
Power Supply: NZXT HALE series - 1000 watt 80+ Gold rated
OS: Windows 10 Pro
RAID Controller: 10Gtek Internal PCI Express SAS/SATA HBA RAID Controller Card, SAS2008 Chip, 8-Port 6Gb/s, Same as SAS 9211-8I
The Chassis itself holds 13 drives on it’s own, there’s 6 in the lower portion, 5 more stacked on top of that, and then 2 lockable hotswap drives on the front of the case. Just to give my drives some separation for thermal reasons, I also put in a 2x5.25" bay to 3x3.5" bay drive holder with a fan in there to give myself another intake fan up front, and I’ve got an AIO cooling my processor. I call my PC my Space Heater, heh
Yes, it was - and I, once again, re-coded them all when I got my mitts on those Restored/Remastered BluRay Versions… they are truly masterful. I may actually have, finally, the last versions I’ll ever need (he says with no confidence what so ever).
I upgrade anything I can to Blu as nothing can be done to a DVD source to make the quality remotely close. Unfortunately I like a lot of stuff that was shot on videotape. Then there is the stuff that was shot on film and remastered in HD but for some reason is unavailable to stream in HD and has not been released on Blu-ray (Three Stooges, Dukes of Hazzard etc.).
I’d say you have the last version of Monty Python you will ever need unless they decide to release it on UHD and give it the HDR treatment.
In that case - I have the last MPFC I’ll ever need.
After 20 years - It’s about time!
(and just in time to honor the great Terry Jones - 2 down, 4 to go)
Backblaze lets you backup an entire RAID for $6/month?
I’ve only been using B2, so even at their extremely low rates that amount of data would add up. But $6/month ain’t so bad.
I was curious about the specs! I have a spare AMD Ryzen 7 1700 lying around that I was thinking I could use for a smaller scale version of what you’re describing. Thanks for the details.
It lets me backup as many RAID Arrays as I can fit in a single PC It allows the backup of “One Device” for $6.00/month. So even if I had a Petabyte or greater of space, as long as it’s a single machine, it’s still only $6.00/month.
Yeah I was talking about setting up batch encoding via the CLI. I’m not sure its possible nor will it really make a huge difference for me.
And I’ve discovered how to export a preset as a JSON file and import it at encode time. I just have a TXT file with the various presets I’ve used saved as a terminal command I can copy paste when I want to or just tap the up arrow in the terminal and browse through my command history until I find the correct preset.
My setup is relatively simple. I just have an iocage jail for Handbrake, and an iocage jail for Plex, I have my Media Dataset shared to both Plex and Handbrake, and a separate Network Storage dataset that I use for general purpose computer storage (standard NAS type stuff). I rip a Bluray through MakeMKV to that Network Storage dataset, then ssh into my Handbrake jail and run an encode command as a background task, then close the terminal and let it run to completion. Its all manual, but works fine for me I guess.
Oh weird, yea I don’t think I actually posted that link. I’ll try to dig it up.
As a random aside, I recently was encoding the 4k77 version of Star Wars: A New Hope. It was huge, 47GB with the majority of the audio track stripped out with MKVToolinx. It was sort of academic since I don’t actually have anything that can play 4k video, but I wanted to compress it down some just for kicks. So I ran it with my new custom preset through x265 at CRF 20 and good LORD it took forever. Not joking, it was over 8 days of all 4 cores pegged at 100%. Totally bonkers. Now I’m aware this is a big of an exercise in futility, but still, I was curious at the result. And the end result is that I really can’t compare them since I have nothing that can play 4K video at native resolution. So yea, waste of time and energy I suppose. Impressed my rig handled that without a hiccup though. The resulting filesize is 20gb vs 47gb. Maybe someday I’ll get a 4k TV and will be able to watch it.
Anyway, I’ve standardized on using a modified version of the Apple 2160p60 4K HEVC Surround preset, basically the same thing but with the CRF cranked up from 24 to 20 and encoder set to “Slower”. I’m sure this combo is why my encodes are glacially slow, but again thats not really an issue for me so I’m cool with it. That being said I’m starting to eye up upgrading my FreeNAS rig to something with more cores and ECC memory. Like a new Ryzen 3600 and an Asrock Rack mainboard.
And lastly, apropos of some of the previous discussion, with the latest iOS apps on my devices (with Plex Advanced Player enabled) I’d had absolutely ZERO issues with DirectPlaying all my content (aside from the aforementioned 4k SW:ANH file) while on my local network. This includes MKV files which don’t DirectPlay with the non-advanced player, so theres very little transcoding going on, and I never see buffering or anything like that. Remotely, transcoding is enabled by necessity but again no issues I’ve seen there. So not sure what all the hoopla is about doing things “just so” to allow directplay to work, but its not an issue whatsoever for me.
Relatively up to date devices don’t suffer as much from the inability to direct play, because they have updated feature sets and codec support. However, Sony has opted not to opt in to x265/h.265 for their PlayStations, many devices still don’t have HD Audio support, some devices don’t allow beyond a certain level for the Codec Profiles, 10bit encoding is hit or miss even without 10bit color, subtitle formats + audio formats cause headaches all the time, etc. To ensure mass compatibility across many devices, you want to remove as many of those fringe variables as possible. That’s what all the “hoopla” is about hehe.
But I digress, my entire library is encoded in x265 and 5.1 AC3 audio, I just burned in my subtitles where needed to ensure as little transcoding as possible, and I, like you, have no issues. Among my users and myself my server is at greater than 95% direct play these days, all while saving space. 
…for clarity - of the 14 possible devices that encounter my Plexiverse, ONE will Direct Play HEVC.
When someone mentions making their library complete HEVC - I think about all the money we could spend buying 13 Shields - or I can make sure I create stuff that will Direct Play.
I do the latter.
lol, you don’t need 13 shields… Amazon Firestick 4K’s ($30/each on special) play HEVC just fine. 99.9% of all newer devices do… You’re just stuck in the past with a bunch of old outdated stuff 
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