I have an extensive movie/tv show library. Been collecting for years and is a mixed bag of media types. I would like to convert all to h265 or something similar to try and conserve space. Currently my media is sitting at around 30TB’s I know from a previous post that is not as significant as some others but converting one by one would be a nightmarish undertaking. I am hoping someone has a cli script to do the conversion.
I am currently using radarr, sonarr, lidarr and readarr for my media I know lidarr and readarr are dead and am looking for an alernative either for those or the full stack. I would also like to perform the conversion of media from the downloaded format to what is suggested to the best format.
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Don’t, unless your library is entirely in UHD/4K you’re going to seriously hurt quality by compressing with h265. And it won’t be that big if a difference in size. And if you ignore that advice at least don’t recompress it from already compressed sources. There are lots of h265 files made from high quality sources out there you should download to replace them instead.
The question is why do you want to convert them?
If you use something like JellyFin as your media server and client, it will transcode them as you watch them. If you’re on your phone using crappy WiFi, it will adapt the bitrate down automatically. If you’re at home using a projector connected by Ethernet, you’ll get the original file.
If you think you’re running out of space, it’s often easier and cheaper to buy more HDDs. H265 and modern audio codec will save you a maximum of 50%. For about £200 you can get a 15TB HDD.
Hell, I’ve found ripping a DVD to MKV results in a 3-5gb file.
Then converting that MKV using handbrake, I can bring the size down as much as 75%. When you’re talking about a thousand videos, that adds up.
TV series (especially older stuff) I can consistently reduce 80%+. This makes a real difference for shows that were on for 10 years.
And these all look fine on a 65" TV from 6’ away. Why store more if I don’t have to?
Ripping straight from physical to media is just the remuxing process.
What you are doing is called an encode.
It can be good. But not as original as the original.It’s like saying an MP3 is as good as a FLAC…
I am investigating TDARR I know a few people have suggested it. I like the nodes feature so I can use my desktop running a heavy GPU as my 2U server cant really run a graphics card (no power connectors for it). I am using a multi node server with E5 XEON chips.
No graphics card? Why do you even think about transcoding? Serious question
My server currently doesn’t have a video card (just the crappy on-board), it transcodes fine for one user (which is all I ever have). I don’t even notice an uptick in cpu when it’s transcoding (I’m sure it does, it just doesn’t seem to impact performance).
This is a 5 year old Dell SFF, running Windows, with 3 Windows VMs in VMware. It has no trouble transcoding, while converting videos using Handbrake. It’s maxed, but it does it.
I do plan to get a video card, it’s just not urgent.
Edit: Just did a test and with 2 simultaneous transcodes, Jellyfin will jump the cpu about 5% on video start, but settle back down to less than 1%.
Disk usage skyrockets with the second transcode, bouncing between 50% and 90%, and the network connection has some hard spikes at video start (with a gigabit connection).
The server that runs the bulk of my homelab does not have a graphics card. My TrueNas Scale server does as well as my desktop. The video’s are stored on the NAS and the remote shares are available on any system. So no graphics card in the server(s) is not ideal but They are beefy servers and still plenty capable of running ffmpeg but the conversion does not have to happen there.
