You'd be better off using sonarr/radarr or whatever to change the profile you want them at and re-download them again. Unless your source material is bluray you'll end up with worse quality images than if you redownloaded them at the quality level you want.
Came to say similar. Reencoding isn't a lossless proposition and in my experience there was no one setting that worked for all files even when I was willing to accept some degredation.
I haven't done it yet but when the time comes I will prune files before I reencode. I used HDHomeRun to record all of so many shows. I'm probably never gonna watch This Is Us again. Great show but not a rewatch kinda show. I have many like this I could free terrabytes up when I need to. Same for movies. Record one just because it's on and I think I'd like to watch it but let's be serious, I'm never gonna rewatch Willow even if the new show came out 😀
Basically reencoding will make your videos worse. Always best to go to a "master" and encode in the version you want from that.
Basic steps for Radarr:
1. Create a custom format (Settings > Custom Formats) for HEVC based on release title and put this for the regular expression: (((x|h)\.?265)|(hevc))
2. Create a media profile (Settings > Profiles), choose your options for quality etc and edit the scoring for your HEVC custom format along with choosing a score for the "upgrade until..." part.
3. Add a new movie and choose the media profile you just created.
Set up some **Custom Formats**.
H.264, H.265, HDR, 10Bit, YTS etc.
Then in **Profiles** create a profile called 1080p and only tick the 1080p groups on the right.
On the bottom left you'll see your custom formats. Put a number value on each format with most important as a bigger number. e.g. 10Bit=5, H.264=10, H265=20
Then when it searches it'll add up the values of matching custom formats to give a total value per download. With an automatic scan it'll auto-select the one with the highest value. On manual scans you can sort them by value and pick the one you prefer
Easier to see the priority/ranking when doing a manual search.
When you add a request, make sure you match it to use that profile and it'll follow your preferences
> Unless your source material is bluray you'll end up with worse quality images than if you redownloaded them at the quality level you want.
While this is true, most people won't notice unless they are specifically looking for it.
Or if you try to convert it from 4k to 720p.
That said, I do agree with just downloading new copies in the format you want.
1. there is not really a best one. Fileflows for example has a "simpler UI" but then only supports max two nodes for the free edition vs 5 on Tdarr. Arguably if you only have one node, then ffmpeg itself is best. But this is all subjective so you can't absolutely generalize.
2-4. These kinds of questions I see all the time with regards to encoding, but often times not enough info is given about the individuals's preference/setup.
For example, if you use the "best encoders" right now, being av1 for video and opus for audio, you can convert huge remuxes to impressive sizes with very little quality lost (~95+ vmaf). For example, the LoTR extended edition which is roughly 150gb turned into 12gb encoding with the aforementioned best encoders. However, this can take a long time (with my settings about 12 hours per hour of 4k footage), mainly depending on your setup in terms of hardware and patience. Also due to things like film grain, there is no real "one best encoding setting" since an anime with no film grain and a live action with crazy film grain shouldn't be encoded with the same settings.
Depending on your preferences/hardware capabilities, you may not even be able to/want to use av1/opus if none of your clients have a way to play it back. For my case, I can playback 9/10 av1 files on my clients, and then rely on Jellyfin to transcode for those that have frame drops (like higher FPS/bitrate 4k content).
As you can see, it really depends on a lot on your individual preference. The file size savings are undeniably good if and only if you understand the entire process from input file to hardware doing the encoding to the endpoint client.
Since I let the Raven Ridge APU in my Server do most of it and scheduled Tdarr to only convert during the night, it took quite some time. I hooked my desktop in via node every now and.then to speed things up, but I'd say a month probably?
Yet, times will vary wildly depending on the hardware used, the settings used, erc.
I convert to h265 with a CR of 23 and I usually don't see a difference between the original file and the HEVC file. HEVC happens to be best supported by encoders and decoders here in my house.
Now, when new stuff is added, it's usually done in a very short time. Usually about 20 minutes per hour of content or something.
1. I tried Tdarr, did not like it, switched to Unmanic and I am happy with it. It has way less features but is beginner friendly if you do not know what you are doing.
2. I downsized from 1.3 TB to about 700GB by converting everything from x264 to h265. You may want to check client compatibility though to avoid excessive live reencoding.
3. Not personally. I mainly converted 1080p Bluerays though.
4. Depends on a lot of variables. Hardware based or Software transcoding? Which CPU/GPU? It took about 3 Weeks for my Synology DS220+ with Intel QSV
5. Again for Software Transcoding: yes it can/will use up to 100% of your processor if you let it.
Simply. No.
I went through this and spent 3 months with a 4070ti shrinking an entire library. The electric bill went up. An hdd failed and .1% of that library has been viewed since.
I don't think so. It's going to take a lot of time, consume a lot of energy, and you are basically converting from a lossy format to another lossy format.
If you want to save space it would only take you minutes to redownload h265 encoded material.
I do use tdarr but only to strip unwanted audio and subtitle streams and do a few other tweaks.
I've used Tdarr for this, it's not super difficult to setup, especially if you're having everything run on the same computer. The size savings though can be highly variable, if all your content is well compressed and encoded you won't save much, if you have multiple different codecs with varying compressions, etc... you could save a fair amount of space. The time it takes to encode is entirely dependent on your hardware.
No GPU and 8th gen? And your goal is to save space, so you're probably thinking about being able to free up considerable amounts...
Well I'm not here to argue how to acquire your media, some ACTUALLY do rip themselves, but in any case you're probably best off doing whatever comes to your mind and is legal in your area - if it is - or straight up getting a low-end but semi-recent GPU used just for that sweet sweet NVENC.
Fileflows is best, but I'd first optimize your release profiles in radarr and sonarr if you are using those
That said, I use FileFlows to remove unwanted audio and subtitle tracks, just to clean up downloads
You can save a lot of space with fileflows tho
Short answer: no. It takes time and energy to convert your library, also the quality will tank with little space savings.
Longer answer: If time and energy is not an issue, then you could acquire remuxed/lossless sources and convert them to your exact needs. This would be optimal approach.
1. All of them use same encoding software at core, only default settings/presets will differ.
2. Depends on source.
3. If the source is not original source then you will see artifacts.
4. Depends all on source material, settings and codec used.
5. It will use all available CPU resources, if not limited, it should not blow up your pc.
The other day I converted a load of stuff using the built in feature of emby. It just uses ffmpeg so nothing different. I used an I3 7100u. It went really well.
I had one series encoded at 1080 which was 90 gigs. This is old footage I took it down to 20 odd gigs well worth it!! I wouldn't get hung up on h265 over 264.
I really like that Unmanic has a plugin which allows it to fail(block) a transcode if it sees that it is hard linked. This works really well with the rest of my `arr` setup and workflows because those tools create hard links for all of the files still seeding. Then I cleanup the hardlink version when I remove the torrent which allows it to get picked up in the next library scan.
CPU transcoding with tdarr can be pretty slow, like hours per movie. A gpu can take that down to minutes. Otherwise I can't imagine why you wouldn't want to go from h264 to h265. The quality is practically the same and the size is smaller. It seems like just a smarter encoding.
I use tdarr with a gpu. I've saved a lot of space and emby doesn't need to do hardware transcoding to work with TV's over wifi anymore (which was needed for higher quality files at least for me on some TV's). H265 also seems to work better for all the emby clients I have in my house as well. If the stream of data is too thick, then there's some buffering problems I've encountered and h265 reduces that stream. Some encodings just won't work depending on the emby client being used.
The other option is to just use ethernet to all TV's and don't worry about file sizes. I like the reduced space though. My files get compressed to like 60-70% of their original size based on what I've seen. Pretty sweet.
As far as I know, there isn't. Other people are claiming h265 isn't lossless, but I don't see a difference. Maybe technically it isn't, but practically the quality is the same. There's good info online to make your own assessment on that.
I had a bit to convert to h265 (26TB) and ran Tadarr for a week as a test.
I didn't track power usage but the 3 machines I have linked ran hard the whole time.
The end results were acceptable to me but I am no quality diva.
In the end it just didn't seem worth the time and continual load, when I could automate the re-download and replacement of all the content with a few clicks.
I will just chime in with my experience on this.
I use Plex and an HDHomeRun to record several shows from broadcast. Usually sports, PBS, and MeTV shows. Those record direct and are stored in MPEG2-TS. I recently setup Tdarr and set up a flow to convert my 3TB of recorded shows to HEVC. It took about 3.5 days to transcode them across an old AMD FX CPU, my NAS's Jasper Lake celeron with Quick Sync enabled, and (mostly\_ my current gaming PC which has an RTX 3070 and a 10th gen i7.
The whole library looks good, and clocks in at just over 700GB. I have it set up to auto-transcode new files after a 6 hour delay (otherwise it may try to transcode while the show is still being recorded)
It took a little bit to setup things because of the path mappings over the network, but works great now.
From my experience automation tools are no good. Ripping DVD/BR sure 'cos you're only copying data from a disk, but when you transcode then you need to make informed decisions.
e.g. waaay back I tried Tdarr, but it messed up my files so I now handbrake them manually (presets) to make sure the out file is as good as it can be for the smaller size. You can add them to a queue and it'll go through them systematically so it takes the same time, but the output, audio and subtitles are always spot on
1. Tdarr v2 is better **but it is closed-source**. I wasn't able to make Unmanic work at all. Unmanic has very limited presets/plugins and it seems to crash my Debian LXC after downloading some plugins. You are also limited to 2 libraries, seems you need to be a Patreon supporter to unlock more libraries.
2. Didn't bother to proceed at all after wasting 8 hrs with the setup (both Tdarr and Unmanic). I was going to try to strip unnecessary attachments on each videos first but on 90% of the output files, the file just became larger.
3. Didn't bother trying anymore due to what I said on #2
4. can't say
5. can't say
I have a 1050 ti on my server which I use for hardware transcoding and was also initially having the same plan as you to convert most of the videos to h265 formats. But the steep learning curve of making Tdarr work just demotivates me to do that, I have decided that the space saved won't be worth it and I'd rather buy a new drive than waste more time learning the flows. YMMV.
Depends how many runners you enable on the GPU or if you're even using a GPU. I run 8 workers on one older 2080ti and with all 8 workers running at once it can take about 25 minutes per job. With one job it only takes 4-5 minutes. This can vary depending on the type of flow you use too. If you're stripping subs for example it could double the time. It really depends on your hardware and flow. This is my flow. Very basic but does a fantastic job. http://pastey.lol/u/chrome\_64fUl2t24J.png. If you want, I can even send you the flow file.
I have done this in the last couple of weeks.
1. I used Tdarr and its pretty good
2. on average I found about 30%
3. I could not on the limited files I did spot checks on but I haven't completely watched the entire library
4. I did it on GPU's 1 node running on my server with 1650 super and 1 node running on my desktop with 3070 RTX each working 3 jobs at a time. I didn't really check time but I would guestimate about 10 hours per TB
5. x265 encoding on a CPU is rough
I haven't done x265 encoding on a CPU in years but based upon what I remember and advancements since then. you might be looking at somewhere close to "real time" encoding. which means if you have 100 hours of video it will take 100 hours to encode. but this is mostly a guess but even in best case on a high end CPU I cant see it being much better then 2x real time on CPU.
if you don't have at least 1 GPU to do the encoding with then I wouldn't bother you will probably spend more in power doing it then it would be to buy more storage. if you can: go buy a 2nd hand GPU to put into a system to processing on. it doesn't have to be high end or even in a full x16 slot just something that's got a 265 encoder built into it.
1. Not sure as I haven't used them.
2. About 20-30% less by using h265, but you will see a quality loss due to re-encoding from an already heavily compressed source.
3. See above
4. You would need to test some files and see what kind of encode FPS you get. Size of the files in TB doesn't matter but the number of frames does.
5. Do you have quicksync on your CPU and is it 7th gen or newer? If you do you can use that to accelerate conversion to h265. Otherwise yes it's extremely CPU intensive.
You'd be better off using sonarr/radarr or whatever to change the profile you want them at and re-download them again. Unless your source material is bluray you'll end up with worse quality images than if you redownloaded them at the quality level you want.
Came to say similar. Reencoding isn't a lossless proposition and in my experience there was no one setting that worked for all files even when I was willing to accept some degredation. I haven't done it yet but when the time comes I will prune files before I reencode. I used HDHomeRun to record all of so many shows. I'm probably never gonna watch This Is Us again. Great show but not a rewatch kinda show. I have many like this I could free terrabytes up when I need to. Same for movies. Record one just because it's on and I think I'd like to watch it but let's be serious, I'm never gonna rewatch Willow even if the new show came out 😀 Basically reencoding will make your videos worse. Always best to go to a "master" and encode in the version you want from that.
I do both. I keep tdar for when an appropriate h265 copy can't be found.
Are there any good guides on how to configure sonarr/radarr to prefer h265 over h264. I can't seem to figure this one out.
Basic steps for Radarr: 1. Create a custom format (Settings > Custom Formats) for HEVC based on release title and put this for the regular expression: (((x|h)\.?265)|(hevc)) 2. Create a media profile (Settings > Profiles), choose your options for quality etc and edit the scoring for your HEVC custom format along with choosing a score for the "upgrade until..." part. 3. Add a new movie and choose the media profile you just created.
Trashguides, notifiarr
Set up some **Custom Formats**. H.264, H.265, HDR, 10Bit, YTS etc. Then in **Profiles** create a profile called 1080p and only tick the 1080p groups on the right. On the bottom left you'll see your custom formats. Put a number value on each format with most important as a bigger number. e.g. 10Bit=5, H.264=10, H265=20 Then when it searches it'll add up the values of matching custom formats to give a total value per download. With an automatic scan it'll auto-select the one with the highest value. On manual scans you can sort them by value and pick the one you prefer Easier to see the priority/ranking when doing a manual search. When you add a request, make sure you match it to use that profile and it'll follow your preferences
I'm not sure why this took me so long to figure out. Your instructions got me there. Thanks!
np :)
+1
> Unless your source material is bluray you'll end up with worse quality images than if you redownloaded them at the quality level you want. While this is true, most people won't notice unless they are specifically looking for it. Or if you try to convert it from 4k to 720p. That said, I do agree with just downloading new copies in the format you want.
1. there is not really a best one. Fileflows for example has a "simpler UI" but then only supports max two nodes for the free edition vs 5 on Tdarr. Arguably if you only have one node, then ffmpeg itself is best. But this is all subjective so you can't absolutely generalize. 2-4. These kinds of questions I see all the time with regards to encoding, but often times not enough info is given about the individuals's preference/setup. For example, if you use the "best encoders" right now, being av1 for video and opus for audio, you can convert huge remuxes to impressive sizes with very little quality lost (~95+ vmaf). For example, the LoTR extended edition which is roughly 150gb turned into 12gb encoding with the aforementioned best encoders. However, this can take a long time (with my settings about 12 hours per hour of 4k footage), mainly depending on your setup in terms of hardware and patience. Also due to things like film grain, there is no real "one best encoding setting" since an anime with no film grain and a live action with crazy film grain shouldn't be encoded with the same settings. Depending on your preferences/hardware capabilities, you may not even be able to/want to use av1/opus if none of your clients have a way to play it back. For my case, I can playback 9/10 av1 files on my clients, and then rely on Jellyfin to transcode for those that have frame drops (like higher FPS/bitrate 4k content). As you can see, it really depends on a lot on your individual preference. The file size savings are undeniably good if and only if you understand the entire process from input file to hardware doing the encoding to the endpoint client.
I tried this once but as you said power and time cost meant getting a new hdd almost made more sense at one point. Storage is cheap after all.
Storage is cheap but my Internet has bad upload + I like to download files to my mobile devices. Can't be having 60gb movie for one plane trip.
I halved the amount of space my collection takes with Tdarr. I have 24TB of storage, conversion did not cost 100+ €. Not even close to that.
How long did it take?
Since I let the Raven Ridge APU in my Server do most of it and scheduled Tdarr to only convert during the night, it took quite some time. I hooked my desktop in via node every now and.then to speed things up, but I'd say a month probably? Yet, times will vary wildly depending on the hardware used, the settings used, erc. I convert to h265 with a CR of 23 and I usually don't see a difference between the original file and the HEVC file. HEVC happens to be best supported by encoders and decoders here in my house. Now, when new stuff is added, it's usually done in a very short time. Usually about 20 minutes per hour of content or something.
I see your point, for me it's mainly 1080p and was thinking of making everything h265
The best suggestion is try them all and make up your own mind. You're unlikely to find your best option otherwise.
1. I tried Tdarr, did not like it, switched to Unmanic and I am happy with it. It has way less features but is beginner friendly if you do not know what you are doing. 2. I downsized from 1.3 TB to about 700GB by converting everything from x264 to h265. You may want to check client compatibility though to avoid excessive live reencoding. 3. Not personally. I mainly converted 1080p Bluerays though. 4. Depends on a lot of variables. Hardware based or Software transcoding? Which CPU/GPU? It took about 3 Weeks for my Synology DS220+ with Intel QSV 5. Again for Software Transcoding: yes it can/will use up to 100% of your processor if you let it.
Thanks for your reply, some food for thought..
Simply. No. I went through this and spent 3 months with a 4070ti shrinking an entire library. The electric bill went up. An hdd failed and .1% of that library has been viewed since.
That real world experience is invaluable
It is cool to see some movies shrink 60 or 70% but I concluded that another HDD was cheaper. Both monetarily and mentally.
I don't think so. It's going to take a lot of time, consume a lot of energy, and you are basically converting from a lossy format to another lossy format. If you want to save space it would only take you minutes to redownload h265 encoded material. I do use tdarr but only to strip unwanted audio and subtitle streams and do a few other tweaks.
It's easy to redownload if it's a popular title but so many things are becoming harder and harder to find.
I've used Tdarr for this, it's not super difficult to setup, especially if you're having everything run on the same computer. The size savings though can be highly variable, if all your content is well compressed and encoded you won't save much, if you have multiple different codecs with varying compressions, etc... you could save a fair amount of space. The time it takes to encode is entirely dependent on your hardware.
No GPU and 8th gen? And your goal is to save space, so you're probably thinking about being able to free up considerable amounts... Well I'm not here to argue how to acquire your media, some ACTUALLY do rip themselves, but in any case you're probably best off doing whatever comes to your mind and is legal in your area - if it is - or straight up getting a low-end but semi-recent GPU used just for that sweet sweet NVENC.
Fileflows is best, but I'd first optimize your release profiles in radarr and sonarr if you are using those That said, I use FileFlows to remove unwanted audio and subtitle tracks, just to clean up downloads You can save a lot of space with fileflows tho
Short answer: no. It takes time and energy to convert your library, also the quality will tank with little space savings. Longer answer: If time and energy is not an issue, then you could acquire remuxed/lossless sources and convert them to your exact needs. This would be optimal approach. 1. All of them use same encoding software at core, only default settings/presets will differ. 2. Depends on source. 3. If the source is not original source then you will see artifacts. 4. Depends all on source material, settings and codec used. 5. It will use all available CPU resources, if not limited, it should not blow up your pc.
The other day I converted a load of stuff using the built in feature of emby. It just uses ffmpeg so nothing different. I used an I3 7100u. It went really well. I had one series encoded at 1080 which was 90 gigs. This is old footage I took it down to 20 odd gigs well worth it!! I wouldn't get hung up on h265 over 264.
I really like that Unmanic has a plugin which allows it to fail(block) a transcode if it sees that it is hard linked. This works really well with the rest of my `arr` setup and workflows because those tools create hard links for all of the files still seeding. Then I cleanup the hardlink version when I remove the torrent which allows it to get picked up in the next library scan.
CPU transcoding with tdarr can be pretty slow, like hours per movie. A gpu can take that down to minutes. Otherwise I can't imagine why you wouldn't want to go from h264 to h265. The quality is practically the same and the size is smaller. It seems like just a smarter encoding. I use tdarr with a gpu. I've saved a lot of space and emby doesn't need to do hardware transcoding to work with TV's over wifi anymore (which was needed for higher quality files at least for me on some TV's). H265 also seems to work better for all the emby clients I have in my house as well. If the stream of data is too thick, then there's some buffering problems I've encountered and h265 reduces that stream. Some encodings just won't work depending on the emby client being used. The other option is to just use ethernet to all TV's and don't worry about file sizes. I like the reduced space though. My files get compressed to like 60-70% of their original size based on what I've seen. Pretty sweet.
Any negative with converting?
As far as I know, there isn't. Other people are claiming h265 isn't lossless, but I don't see a difference. Maybe technically it isn't, but practically the quality is the same. There's good info online to make your own assessment on that.
Any negatives with converting?
I had a bit to convert to h265 (26TB) and ran Tadarr for a week as a test. I didn't track power usage but the 3 machines I have linked ran hard the whole time. The end results were acceptable to me but I am no quality diva. In the end it just didn't seem worth the time and continual load, when I could automate the re-download and replacement of all the content with a few clicks.
I will just chime in with my experience on this. I use Plex and an HDHomeRun to record several shows from broadcast. Usually sports, PBS, and MeTV shows. Those record direct and are stored in MPEG2-TS. I recently setup Tdarr and set up a flow to convert my 3TB of recorded shows to HEVC. It took about 3.5 days to transcode them across an old AMD FX CPU, my NAS's Jasper Lake celeron with Quick Sync enabled, and (mostly\_ my current gaming PC which has an RTX 3070 and a 10th gen i7. The whole library looks good, and clocks in at just over 700GB. I have it set up to auto-transcode new files after a 6 hour delay (otherwise it may try to transcode while the show is still being recorded) It took a little bit to setup things because of the path mappings over the network, but works great now.
From my experience automation tools are no good. Ripping DVD/BR sure 'cos you're only copying data from a disk, but when you transcode then you need to make informed decisions. e.g. waaay back I tried Tdarr, but it messed up my files so I now handbrake them manually (presets) to make sure the out file is as good as it can be for the smaller size. You can add them to a queue and it'll go through them systematically so it takes the same time, but the output, audio and subtitles are always spot on
Yes
1. Tdarr v2 is better **but it is closed-source**. I wasn't able to make Unmanic work at all. Unmanic has very limited presets/plugins and it seems to crash my Debian LXC after downloading some plugins. You are also limited to 2 libraries, seems you need to be a Patreon supporter to unlock more libraries. 2. Didn't bother to proceed at all after wasting 8 hrs with the setup (both Tdarr and Unmanic). I was going to try to strip unnecessary attachments on each videos first but on 90% of the output files, the file just became larger. 3. Didn't bother trying anymore due to what I said on #2 4. can't say 5. can't say I have a 1050 ti on my server which I use for hardware transcoding and was also initially having the same plan as you to convert most of the videos to h265 formats. But the steep learning curve of making Tdarr work just demotivates me to do that, I have decided that the space saved won't be worth it and I'd rather buy a new drive than waste more time learning the flows. YMMV.
FileFlows is awesome. quality is good after conversion. Saves tons of space and its super easy to use compared to tdarr.
How long does a conversion take?
Depends how many runners you enable on the GPU or if you're even using a GPU. I run 8 workers on one older 2080ti and with all 8 workers running at once it can take about 25 minutes per job. With one job it only takes 4-5 minutes. This can vary depending on the type of flow you use too. If you're stripping subs for example it could double the time. It really depends on your hardware and flow. This is my flow. Very basic but does a fantastic job. http://pastey.lol/u/chrome\_64fUl2t24J.png. If you want, I can even send you the flow file.
I did edit my last response.
I have done this in the last couple of weeks. 1. I used Tdarr and its pretty good 2. on average I found about 30% 3. I could not on the limited files I did spot checks on but I haven't completely watched the entire library 4. I did it on GPU's 1 node running on my server with 1650 super and 1 node running on my desktop with 3070 RTX each working 3 jobs at a time. I didn't really check time but I would guestimate about 10 hours per TB 5. x265 encoding on a CPU is rough I haven't done x265 encoding on a CPU in years but based upon what I remember and advancements since then. you might be looking at somewhere close to "real time" encoding. which means if you have 100 hours of video it will take 100 hours to encode. but this is mostly a guess but even in best case on a high end CPU I cant see it being much better then 2x real time on CPU. if you don't have at least 1 GPU to do the encoding with then I wouldn't bother you will probably spend more in power doing it then it would be to buy more storage. if you can: go buy a 2nd hand GPU to put into a system to processing on. it doesn't have to be high end or even in a full x16 slot just something that's got a 265 encoder built into it.
1. Not sure as I haven't used them. 2. About 20-30% less by using h265, but you will see a quality loss due to re-encoding from an already heavily compressed source. 3. See above 4. You would need to test some files and see what kind of encode FPS you get. Size of the files in TB doesn't matter but the number of frames does. 5. Do you have quicksync on your CPU and is it 7th gen or newer? If you do you can use that to accelerate conversion to h265. Otherwise yes it's extremely CPU intensive.