So, I have been trying to get my shows onto my mobile device, and I have come across the need to stop being a noob with video quality settings and actually understand them, mostly to try and fit as many shows as possible on my phone.
I am tying to compare what it says in plex to what it says in Windows.
In plex you have the choice of bandwidth by the frame size, so like 480p by 1.5mbps.
But I am having a hard time understanding how to compare this rate to what I see in Windows properties for a file.
Letâs have an example, I download pokemon.01x01 in 1.5mbps 480p on the android app while in Windows, for the file properties it shows:
Frame height 640
Frame width 480
Data rate: 0kbps
Total bitrate: 64kbps
Frame rate: 23.98 ps
How can I understand what quality this is in the plex app and whether I get worse or better in plex and, basically how to make it comparable to what I see in Windows?
Also on a related note, in Android, is 0.7mbps quality still 4880p?
video quality is a tricky thing as it considers different factors.
1. Video resolution / size
A video has a certain size; a video thatâs 1920 pixels wide and 1080 pixels high is usually called âFull HDâ or â1080pâ. When you get your video from a disc, theyâre currently stored in 16:9 aspect ratio (video is 1.78x wider than itâs height).
2. Video bitrate
If you store a video picture by picture, youâll end up with a huge amount of data⊠thatâs why videos in our days are âencodedâ â the encoding is using some clever tricks to avoid storing every single pixel of every single picture; just imaging⊠you have a 90 minutes movie, the movie plays at 24 pictures per second (~130k single pictures), each picture with a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels (~270 billion pixels) â in good-old RGB colorspace, each pixel could be one of up to ~16.6M colors, adding up to roughly 800 GB. Thatâs a lot of spaceâŠ
Your regular Blu-Ray video takes only 20-40 GB of space thanks to the before mentioned encoding.
The indicator âbits per secondâ tells you how much picture information there are for each second of video material. A modern encoder can store the video in great quality at a significantly decreased size â you can usually opt for file size or quality⊠hence thereâs full HD videos with 40GB (e.g. on a Blu-Ray) or 3-4GB (e.g. as an online purchase â sometimes even smaller for online streams. The smaller the file, the higher the impact on picture quality as at some point thereâs lots of information missing resulting in the picture to show blurring or pixelation.
3. Codecs
The above will only give you a good grasp of video quality, if you compare videos encoded with the same codec. A codec is sort of the format description, describing how an encoder can save the video more efficiently.
And the codec matters⊠e.g. the codec used for DVDs (e.g. MPEG2) is much older and less efficient than the codec used on Blu-Rays (e.g. MPEG4/h264 or VC1). If you get a video file of the same size from both codecs, youâll notice that the quality of the DVD is significantly lower.
Thatâs why it took the introduction of yet a newer codec (h265) for the movie industry to properly offer 4K movies⊠with the older codecs the mass of data for a 4K video would have exploded the available storage on a disc.
What does Plex do?
If for some reason, Plex doesnât have enough bandwidth to directly send a video to your client (e.g. due to a poor network connection or upload/download speed restrictions of the server/client), Plex will attempt to reduce the video quality so it can squeeze it through that bottleneck.
Where to look for what information?
Windows explorer is a poor source of information⊠all you can get from that is information on the video size (and even for that looks fishy⊠could it be you switched width and height?). IF the bitrate is correct, this is a very lousy encode⊠even below the lowest quality setting offered by Plex while maintaining the original resolution.
download mediainfo here
(pay attention during installation, it comes with a âpiggybackedâ installer which asks to install additional crapware. Make sure to set/clear the right checkboxes!)
It is a very bad encoding, it is a 1990s show from the old days, and mostly taken from TV etc, I do have better encodes but this actually works really well even on 32" for this particular show. It also demonstrates my problem well since I actually want to move this show to my phone via the Android app while making it as small as possible, I would like to think I could get each season (80 episodes) into 1GB, atm it is about 6GB, but I also need these files to play ok on a 15.6" screen if I choose to attach my phone to my laptop; so, that is interesting to know that this is actually lower than even the lowest settings on Plex app. That means I can shrink the file size to the very smallest and still have the same quality I would see on my PC.
You see this is what I would like to know, how do you know that encoding is worse than anything Plex offers?
I mean I know the definition of each item I look at but I dunno how to sum them together and say: this option on Plex is better than what I see in Windows, or worse but only a small amount, or a lot worse but should be ok on smaller screens still.
Ah, I never knew that about h265, I do almost everything in it now-a-days but never actually knew that about it, I mostly did it since everyone else moved over to h265, though quite a few of my files are still 264 which sounds like a good option too for general TV shows etc.
What is a good program to inspect a video file and find out information that would be comparable to the options in the Android app? I look in my Plex server app but all I see for the episode is â480p h264â which isnât incredibly useful, even the âget infoâ link gives me nothing more than what Windows explorer does.
It is good to note here, that I am using offline sync in the android app so it is a case of encoding and saving the file to my device. I do not really intend to stream from my server, this is more for travel and stuffâŠ
I kind of read that and got the idea of looking at the XML file, and I think I understand that what Plex says is required for the file is 0.7MBps which would relate to the lowest figure on the Android app, which sounds like a good way to compare.
