My plan to conserve disk space (convert files to x265)

General Discussions
1

Hello! Thank you for any advice in advance. I am kind of new at this, I have a decent sized collection running on a 3 disk ZFS array which is a few gigs away from running out of space. Majority of my collection is TV Shows in 720p and 1080p x264 files I obtained through totally legal sources. I want to eventually expand my storage but currently that would mean buying a new cabinet, motherboard on top of the 2-3 new hard disks I’d need.

Now because of the variances in these files’ sources, they vary per-episode quite a bit but quite a sizeable few of them are in the 3.5-5GB per episode range. I can start by converting the largest shows to x265. I am experimenting with an episode of Criminal Minds and a CFR of 23 under fast x265 preset took a 4.7GB episode down to 600MB, quality seems rather okay.

My clients are Xbox One, MacBook Pro, iPhone X, Chromecast 2, Android devices (LG G4 running a Nougat ROM primarily). I think majority of them can do HEVC playback and my server can (probably) handle transcoding one of them.

I know transcoding a rip is a sin, but a CFR of 23 seems to be giving decent quality. Anyone has any feedback?

2

Interested to know about this myself.

What is your Plex Media Server running on hardware/prosessor wise? Do you have hardware encoding enables in Plex settings?

How does it play?

3

I currently have an older AMD 8 core processor and 16 gig of RAM on my server. I’m able to get about four x265 streams going before it starts to croak. If you plan on having more than one person streaming from your server, don’t do it on anything less than a six or eight core system. It does use a LOT of CPU. I setup a Plex server as a backup on my mother’s four core intel all in one PC. It works great when only she is watching something. If we both try to watch something (even if one of the streams is a regular transcode) one of us loses.

4

Hard drive space is cheaper than cpu power. Don’t do it.

5

@OttoKerner said:
Hard drive space is cheaper than cpu power. Don’t do it.
It’ll cost me a fair amount at the moment to expand my storage, I figured it’s worth a shot. I’ll be transcoding a select few shows taking a huge amount of space, and if it doesn’t work I can download them again.