MKV conversion has been such a hot topic for years, but I have to wonder…
With PC’s and media devices (including phones) so powerful these days, storage space relatively cheap, and broadband more…well, broad (haha), is there still a huge need to convert MKVs to MP4 format?
My routine has always been buy the BD, rip the MKV, convert to MP4, and rinse and repeat. I have to always go in tweak some audio track setting or some other weird thing when I convert to MP4.
My PMS runs on an old Xeon CPU ( X5675 @ 3.07GHz), 16GB RAM, Uverse fiber with over 500mbps upload, and 30 TB of drive space. It’s not that fast compared to modern setups but it’s not bad.
I still get buffering issues sometimes with smaller MP4s, but it’s about the same as when I stream my MKV files as well. It will probably always be that way (I get occasional streaming issues with Amazon and others, as well).
I would love to know how many people still convert, and how many just use the native MKV files. Is there still a huge need for it?
Just quick note here that storage prices are rising right now. Nobody’s sure if it will continue, or the trend will bust and prices will drop again.
IMO, you’ll see very differing opinions here, based on previous conversations. I’ll tell you where I’ve found my “sweet spot” so far:
By default, keep the full Blu-Ray, including the lossless audio track.
If the Blu-Ray is VC-1, do a high-quality 1080p encode to the codec of your choice (HEVC for me), and keep the audio track. Use a codec that you can trust will direct-play everywhere, unlike VC-1.
If it’s a movie you want to keep, maybe watch once every couple years (or less), but don’t feel like you need to waste a ton of space on it, reduce the size by doing an encode of the video (1080p HEVC for me) and audio (Reduce a 5.1 DTS-HD MA down to a 5.1 AC3 at 512 kbps). This will probably reduce a 20-30GB movie to 3GB or so for me. And my SO can’t tell the difference on a big screen.
For steps 2 and 3, I copy all the original full-quality files to an offline external USB hard drive, in case I ever have a problem or space gets even cheaper.
That leaves you with…
A bunch of huge files for the movies you actually care about.
A high-quality copy of movies that likely won’t direct-play (due to VC-1) on most devices
A high-quality copy of movies you just don’t need to waste 30GB to have available. That adds up!
A hard drive with all the originals in case you ever see a problem with an encode, or want to re-encode them to HEVC, AV1, or whatever next-gen codec arrives in 5 years.
As always, you have excellent advice, Cafe_Diem, for media management.
However, I was more curious if there was still a huge need for it. You have a pretty sweet system for managing space and transcoding needs, and it’s not very different from the way I store my media–a full BD rip and then make a smaller file for actual viewing.
But as RealJerk replied below…this isn’t 2008 any more. It just doesn’t seem as crucial to mess with the original MKV when most devices (and obviously the PMS, itself) can do the heavy lifting (transcoding) for you.
Obviously the case-by-case varies. If my current collection of 450 BluRays was 4500, I guess I’d definitely be worried about space, so re-encoding for a smaller file size would be important, for example.
Exactly. So are most Plex users still doing the “MKV to MP4 Shuffle”? It seems like 4K and Atmos has given users a new reason to go back to doing that.
No disagreement, in fact I made a similar argument in another thread a while back!
For me, it’s just so hard to justify buying more drives to store (for example) romantic comedies that look functionally-identical at 1/10 of the size with HEVC. But even considering that, the vast majority of my collection is still the original-quality file. As drives get bigger in the next few years and I upgrade, I may just restore those original copies.
The only real case I’d make for encoding is the VC-1’s, but that’s for technical reasons instead of storage. I’ve just run into so many problems with them. First, the Shield supported direct play, then didn’t, then did again. Then the acceleration worked on PMS for Windows, then didn’t, then sometimes works. It just became a pain, so finally I encoded them to HEVC 10-bit. It was only around 25 discs, comparatively little. They look great and I never think about them anymore.
One related note: I haven’t been able to justify storing original quality for every TV show. It would take me over 4TB just to store a few well-known sci-fi TV shows like Star Trek TOS, TNG, X-Files, and Eureka. It adds up so fast. I’ve accepted encoding those at approximately 1GB per episode.
Excellent points. I personally haven’t seen the compatibility issues with VC-1 disks, but I don’t get a lot of feedback from my Plex family members about media problems. They’re grateful to access to my library and they don’t want to complain. That’s great, but it also keeps me in the dark about problems I am not aware of.
I generally don’t, but there are some odd cases where Plex on the Firestick 4K drops frames on certain .mkv files and I have to optimize them to “original quality” which adds an .mp4 version to the disk.
For 1080p and below, I convert to .MP4 with HandBrake for maximum compatibility with various players. And, like you (the OP), it does permit me to tweak various things like normalizing audio levels and burning in subtitles so as to minimize the need for on-the-fly transcoding.
For UHD, I keep the .MKV because anything that can handle UHD won’t have a problem with a .MKV container. However, I still reduce the bit-rate with HandBrake to keep the disk space and network throughput requirements down.
Not sure if that was aimed at the OP or my reply?
It’s not like times don’t change if it was aimed at my comment.
Embedded flawed metadata in MP anything is a huge reason why I will treat MP4 in the same way as I treat avi files….As a virus that must be removed immediately.
As someone who uses Apple devices mostly it’s not like it hasn’t been at least a couple of years in Plex that on such devices Plex hasn’t made them as capable as any other device for MKV. As with everything else time moves on.
“The rules of 4K” moved on.
On a 5 year old CPU with Intel Q/S it’s not like we can’t transcode at least 5 or 6 80GB 4K HDR remux files simultaneously at about 10%-20% CPU usage, whilst maintaining the quality of a 1080p Web/dl (at minimum.)
So that just comes back to all posts as to why stuff isn’t always identified correctly in Plex.
90% of the time it’s down to the “MP4 Virus.”
A cool way of doing things 5-10 years ago. Totally redundant far longer than this decade.
Are you referring to when 4K was using .mp4 files? That was a temporary stepping stone until they sorted out the mkv issues, now all 4K are mkv AFAIK including dolby vision.
I’m fairly sure that @FrettD wasn’t referring to 4K at all as he never referenced it.
More to when the ATV needed to remux the mkv container to mp4 regardless of resolution.
