Is HEVC (8-bit)/AAC a good, modern CODEC combination for rebuilding & reducing my library size without compromising quality? Helpful feedback would be appreciated.
If you’re concerned about quality, re-encoding from a lossy format to another lossy format is always going to lose more quality. Even if the format you choose would have been better quality if it was encoded directly from the source, the result is almost certainly going to look worse than what you have now.
Exactly this, avoid re-encoding at all costs. Giant hard drives are real cheap these days
Certified refurbished drives. They’re less reliable than new, but a hell of a lot cheaper. I’ve been running my Plex on a 14 TB.
Just beware of the sound levels of some of those drives.
Yeah it’s fine I reencoded almost my entire library into that as soon as my devices were able to play it.
But if you can wait a couple more years AV1 will be better
If they can wait a couple more years I’m sure that in that time they’ll save up enough money to get a new HDD/SSD so there’s no need to reencode
Yes it’s good, but with AV1 hanging about then you’re WAAAY better off using that over x265.
I re-encode all my stuff with AV1. It will take a 40GB x264 rip to 3-4GB. Where as with x265 It will be around 10-15GB.
It’s a significant difference in storage size and (as far as I can tell) no obvious difference in quality.
if u re getting 3 to 4Gb out of a 40G x264, u re definitely losing a lot of data… With proper settings, It should be around 16 - 18G. AV1 can’t do miracles.
For sure!
What I’m talking about is perception of quality. If you know what you’re looking for then you’ll notice some of the artifacts. Especially in the darkest areas and when going from HDR to SDR.
It still looks better than steaming the same thing off of Netflix, Hulu, etc. So that’s all I need/want.
I fully realize there’s compromise there and if I want to view it in all its original glory I can bust out the bluray.
Sadly some clients (nvidia shield tv) does not support AV1 :( right now I’m encoding some AV1 content I have back to HEVC just because of that.
A lot of processing power to use (re-encoding and transcoding for certain streaming clients) when, like others say, it might just be easier to not bother
I agree and have found that out. HEVC is a hog when it comes to processing. But, the reason I’m re-encoding is because my system crashed or should I say someone crashed it for me (long story) and I need to rebuild a large part of my library and just want everything consistent.
It’s crazy. Why does the libx265 take SO much processing power to just convert ONE file at a time. I mean it pushes my CPU to >80% and if I try 2 files it’s 100% and stays there. And, the hevc_amf encoder won’t create 10-bit HEVC through the GUI I use. I’m just about ready to encode from the original sources again to h.264 and forget it.
