Do you encode your movies and why if so?

L

lone wolf

Gawd
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Feb 4, 2003
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705
Greetings

I stated in an earlier post that I am starting to use Handbrake to re-encode my movies for my tablets. I have over 20tb of movies,tv shows and Blu Rays. I have started on my tv shows which I have over 4tb worth. Bringing them down in size and keeping the quality is important to me. I have my settings on Handbrake set to strict and a video size of RF 15. this looks pretty good to me, also encoding to MP4, as I want to play them on my tablets.

but with doing this it is taking some time to complete. I am just curious how many of you do this (re-encode) your movies and just what settings do you use. i would like to keep my blu rays at 1080p if at all possible. Do you do it for space or for ease of backup? I am pretty scared of losing movies due to a hdd failure and what have you.

I appreciate your replies and insights.
 
I only remuxe from mkv to m4v for compatibility, only time I'll convert is when its xvid for divx, I must have h.264, at least until a better codec comes out.
 
I dont encode or compress my videos. Im too lazy and don't feel like doing it. I also don't hang on to things very long I don't watch enough things over and over. For me the time it took to encode them to MP4 wasn't worth the time.

I also don't watch my media on other devices like my phone or tablet.

If you're worried about losing your data it would be wise if you haven't already, have a mirrored RAID array or something with redundancy. That way if one drive goes bad you don't loose your data.
 
i encode things I want to put my daughters ipod (sesame street and such), and my weapon of choice is handbrake it never lets me down.
 
straight ISO for DVD (but only the movie, not the entire disc) here. I haven't gotten into ripping my Blurays yet, but I don't have very many (~15). Other than that, I only have MP3's, which are already compressed down.
 
over the past year I was building a massive server to hold all of my media. Now I am looking at condensing things more and more. I have all of my dvd's ripped to video_ts folders, blu rays to an ISO. I went from a 3500sq ft home to a 500sq ft studio. so I am making teh most of my space. I just started looking at downsizing my movies recently so I have started with my tv shows. I used to have multiple htpc's, 1 in every room of my house, now its a vizio tablet and one main pc.

I'm just curious what the members here do with their massive collections I am always reading about. leaving them or downsizing them.
 
I can't speak for handbrake, but I re-encode all Blu-rays (Movies and TV Series) with Ripbot264. HD space is cheap, I refuse to delete or compress files whenever possible. In a perfect world, I would do just a straight rip and it would work perfectly on all my devices.;) Since that's not the case, it's all about finding the happy medium for yourself, based on your situation. The only reason I re-encode is because my xbox360 extenders would choke on an uncompressed BR. Not all the time, but visually intense movies/scenes would be too much. Basically, Avatar was unwatchable, but Hot Tub Time Machine had no problems:p.

When it comes to backups, it depends on how much it would hurt to lose anything. The way I look at it - I have 600 movies in my collection. If I had to re-do the collection from discs, at roughly 30 min per copy, it would take me 12.5 days of non-stop copying - yeah, were not even counting re-encode time if necessary. Because of this, all my media drives are backed up to external bare drives every month or so, which I store at my parents house down the street. Yeah, I don't mess around when it comes to backups.

The reason I use Ripbot is because it has an xbox360 encode profile which simply caps the max bitrate to 14.3 Mbps w/5.1 sound (Roughly 8GB/hr). I use an i7 2600K @ 4.5GHz to do my encoding, which usually takes 2-3 hours which doesn't bother me too much. This is my happy medium, as I can't tell the difference between the straight rip and my compressed version.

The way I "tested" it was I compared a quick rip of "the birds" scene from Planet Earth (Which I heard somewhere is a very high bitrate scene). On my 50in Samsung plasma hooked directly to the HTPC, sitting on the couch 15ft away, I couldn't tell the difference. I even went as far as comparing screenshots 2ft away from the TV, but at that point, the tiny differences I could find were probably just in my head since I was looking for faults. It's a pretty balanced give/take when it comes to filesize vs. quality, so pay more attention to the display and devices you want/plan to use rather than worrying too much about the numbers. I used my 50in Samsung for my video quality testing because it's the only TV I have where you can even remotely tell the difference between 1080P vs. 720P. My wife and I have a 42in LG in our bedroom, and if you can tell the difference between 1080 vs 720 while laying in bed 15ft away, I hope you're flying jet fighters mr. eagle eyes.:p Here's a graph chart that sums it all up nicely. http://s3.carltonbale.com/resolution_chart.html


EDIT: I forgot to mention, I also convert .mkv to .WTV as the final step using DVRMS Toolbox which takes 5 min or so. Since I run Win7MC, converting everything over to WTV reduced hiccups and simplified the setup.
 
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What I would recommend is to transcode on the fly to your tablets. That way you aren't really using up extra space just to view the data on your smaller devices. Once you are done viewing them the files go away.

There are many A/V server systems out there. Pogo, subsonic, and a few others come to mind. All do a pretty good job of transcoding on the fly.
 
I have my entire DVD collection backed up as movie only to single layer discs (which requires compression most of the time). On the rare occasion that someone wants to see some special feature or something, I'll break the original out and watch it, but other than that, the originals stay in their pretty little cases untouched and undamaged.

Just recently I got my first bluray player, and that necessitated a bluray burner for my computer. The plan was to do essentially the same thing with the blurays that I have done with the DVDs - make backups to use so as not to ever damage the originals. So that is what I have done so far with my new collection of about 15 or so blurays. I am doing the movie only thing again, and burning them to single layer discs (which again requires some compression most of the time). I am keeping the HD audio tracks intact on my backups, and as far as the video is concerned, I can't tell the difference between the original and the backup on my 60" DLP.

All that said, I am quite interested in what many of these folks here at [H] are doing with their HTPCs. I have seen some of these XBMC front ends that just look outstanding, and I would love to build a new rig to do that. The whole idea of being able to pick what to watch, be it a movie, a TV show, or whatever, and not have to fool with finding the disc and all that, is really appealing too. So now I am faced with a second encode for HDD storage.

I have been using the 25GB movie only isos that I have prepared for burning, and running those through handbrake at RF:19. Keeping the HD audio intact, I am getting about 9GB - 14GB encodes per movie. Dealing with the HD audio is what is throwing me for a loop though. I ultimately would like to have both the HD audio and a "fallback" audio in case the ability to decode the HD audio doesn't exist. Of course file size is important to me, so I don't want to just throw a bunch of audio tracks in the mkv and bloat it out.

So, like the OP, I am trying to figure out the best approach for me right now in this media-management conundrum. My latest idea (and likely the one I will decide to do) is to just scratch the HD audio on my encodes for the HTPC. The HD audio is comprising between 25 and 40% of the total size of the movie, and that is fairly significant (at least to me who is working with a 1TB HDD as of now). I figure that if I am just chillin' and want to watch something, I can still have great quality 1080p video, and damn good audio using my HTPC. If the bug hits me that I feel like having even better quality video and audio, I can always get out my backup bluray and pop it in. And, if I want the best possible, I can break out the original bluray and watch that.

I was really wanting to break away from burning discs altogether, but I don't think that is going to work for me. Making a backup of the original blurays just makes good sense to me, and in the event of a lightning strike frying my HDD while performing a backup to my external HDD (thus frying it too), I will still have the burnt discs as a backup too.

tl;dr - no worries... I was just rambling on and on and on and on. Nothing to see here.
 
lone wolf said:
Greetings

I stated in an earlier post that I am starting to use Handbrake to re-encode my movies for my tablets. I have over 20tb of movies,tv shows and Blu Rays. I have started on my tv shows which I have over 4tb worth. Bringing them down in size and keeping the quality is important to me. I have my settings on Handbrake set to strict and a video size of RF 15. this looks pretty good to me, also encoding to MP4, as I want to play them on my tablets.

but with doing this it is taking some time to complete. I am just curious how many of you do this (re-encode) your movies and just what settings do you use. i would like to keep my blu rays at 1080p if at all possible. Do you do it for space or for ease of backup? I am pretty scared of losing movies due to a hdd failure and what have you.

I appreciate your replies and insights.
Click to expand...

You have moved from 3500sqft to 500sqft.

6 4TB hard drives take up very little space. I would rather buy new hard drives and copy the data over thn recode them. One benefit is you have a backup. Put the back up in a storage room with the rest of your excess stuff.
 
yes i went fron a 3500sq ft home to a 500 sq ft studio. this year has sucked ... home job health all gone but still positive :)
 
I don't need blu-ray quality on a tablet. Most of the detail of blu-ray is totally wasted on a tablet. I rip to IOS or bit-perfect MKV on my my 35+ TB of storage, but this is intended for viewing on my 3 full-blown home theaters, not for a tablet.

For tablets, I rip with handbrake using RF=20 and try to get the file size below 2GB per movie. Trying to preserve full blu-ray quality for tablet viewing is to show a complete lack of understanding of what is happening when you view content on a tablet. Also, I never watch block-buster movies on a tablet, either, as that is a totally sucky experience. But I will watch these older movies from my rips if I am on travel, stuck in a hotel or on a plane, and need a way to kill the time. That's why my re-encodes come in handy. And keep in mind that keeping 1080p resolution (also not important on a tablet) is NOT the same thing as keeping blu-ray quality. IMO, blu-ray quality is the TOP consumer-level experience and if you do any encoding at all you will have less than that. I do rip to 1080p, though, because I have several PC screens that display at that resolution, so my "tablet" encodes are intended for use on them too.
 
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