Video Pirate Question
Video Pirate Question
For those of you that torrent video files this question is geared toward you. I'm looking for a sweet spot between quality, size & speed for HEVC encoding. I'm using FastFlix and seem to be getting really wide and varying speeds.
I'm not really literate on all this video lingo but I can, at least, get it going. Most files take anywhere from 5-17 mins for a 30-40 mins clip. I have a AMD Radeon RX 470 graphics card but when I try and use the VCEEnc it won't let me use CRF which I've heard it the best way.
Anyway, if you're willing to share knowledge or what settings you use when you convert video to HEVC that might help me speed up my processing, I would be eternally grateful.
Don’t encode lossy to lossy. The encoding will take forever and the image quality will suffer. If you want file size savings redownload your media in h265 or whatever. Or temporarily download a lossless copy, encode, and delete.
There are no lossless copies of any movie that have ever been released to the public
Delivery formats (h265, h264, h263 etc) are compressed and lossy.
In most cases, most release groups already fine tune encoding settings towards various balances of file size and quality, so the best option is to decide on a set of release group whose standards meet your needs and just use the files as they come without further modification.
Applying lossy compression to a video that's already had lossy compression applied to it degrades it unnecessarily, so if you're going to compress it yourself, it's best to start with the remux, aka the original media file.
I'd personally recommend releases from members of the qxr group and Vyndros.
I understand about reencoding and I've gotten a lot of flak about that from a lot of people but as I mentioned above it's more of a space issue with me also. I appreciate the mention of groups to look to as that helps much. Thanks for your input!
I'm confused... Are you grabbing pirated video files from the net and re-encoding them... If you're attempting to further compress already compressed video, you're just zipping a zip file. It's crazy and you'll do nothing but bloat the file size (versus a properly compressed video file) and further reduce the quality of the video via artifacts. I'll call the police and have you committed right now.
If you're grabbing 8/4k or UHD BD movies and re-encoding them into lets say, 1080p HEVC 10bit, I could see that being worth it if you really love the movie (and have 5 days with nothing to do), but only if you're going from an inferior compression to better (h264 to h265), otherwise like I said, you're zipping a zip file.
you'll do nothing but bloat the file size
That's very wrong. Going from h.264 to h.265 cuts file size down to 25-50% of the original. That's what the HE is for in HEVC.
- I've been encoding HEVC for a long time and I've not once seen a file-size drop that dramatically. You're outrageously overestimating the file-size savings here.
- If a video file is already compressed you'll see diminished and even negative returns by attempting to compress it further. OP seems to be taking pre compressed video files from the internet and attempting to compress them again (lossy to lossy) which is very very very stupid.
You’re correct that it will reduce file size but encoding lossy to lossy is foolish. You will introduce compression artifacts and have an objectively worse quality image, the encode will take much longer than if you used a proper lossless source, and if you don’t set your configs right you’ll strip out subtitles, tags, chapters, etc
Additionally if the h264 was already compressed by a lot h265 won’t save all that much space, giving you all the downsides with basically no upside
Only dummies encode lossy>lossy. The debate about lossy>h265 is one thing (h265 is not for archival) but h264>h265 will result in visible distortion
Blu-rays are compressed. "Zipping a zip file" doesn't apply here because zips are lossless. Video encoding is almost entirely lossy, and there's a lot of tradeoffs to be made between file size and quality. The whole point of the more efficient codecs is to minimize the quality tradeoff. There's also a bunch of parameters to tune the resulting bitrate which is the #1 factor in deciding the final filesize.
That being said, I'll agree that the least quality loss will come from using a Blu-ray remux since those are very high quality.
Blu-rays are compressed.
All streaming data is compressed at some point. I clearly meant not over-compressed. 4K video or UHD BD can both be taken from their original states and processed through HEVC to get crisp 1080p h265 10bit at a steep data discount. But it'll take a very long time to process. It's simply not worth it.
“Zipping a zip file” doesn’t apply here because zips are lossless.
It's a figurative expression and I feel that was pretty damn obvious...
you can re-encode something at literally any bitrate, this isn't relatable at all to "zipping a zip file" this is "opening a zip file, opening the document inside, removing data you don't need, resaving it and rezipping it"
You need to do 2 pass encoding. You should also not use CRF. You should pick a bitrate for the file size you want. Do a first pass which analyzes the video to see which sections require more data, and then run a second pass which will give high bitrate to more action scenes and lower bitrate to the credits and slower talking scenes.
Some action scenes require 5 times more data to look as good as a talking dinner scene, you couldn't even notice the quality difference but the bitrate requirement is literally 5 times more.
You also need to use the slow preset and use x265 if you're doing this to archive the stuff forever. Do it once and do it right.
2 pass encoding is only to get the benefits of variable bit rate when targeting a specific file size. If you don’t have a specific file size in mind, that’s what CRF is for.
No, the specific file size is irrelevant, he's wanting smaller file sizes. CRF is a waste of data on more than 70% of scenes in hollywood movies. You set a bitrate and let it go. This is also why virtually all music now is VBR
Thank you, this is VERY helpfuly information! As I mentioned in another reply the ffmpeg front-end I use FastFlix only allows bitrate or CQ encoding when using the VCEEnc Hardware encoder for AMD so your information is noted and very appreciated!
Are you short on disk space? Personally I'd just buy enough storage that I don't even need to care
Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. I only have two 2Tb drives and they are about full so I'm looking to downsize my files. Someone recommended buying a USB hub and several 16Tb Seagate drives to accomodate but I'm not sure if that's the best option.
Different people have different needs.
If someone has a lot of time and not a lot of money re encoding video is a decent answer.
I've been there and done that before.
Replacing (or adding a 10TB USB to your ) single 2 tb drive isn't a horrible idea. It'll take you quite a while to go through that 10 tb. In the meantime you look toward getting an old case and some kind of modest motherboard and setting up an Unraid. It's a journey, and unless you are made of cash you're not going to get to your endpoint all in one jump.
Unraid is budget friendly because you can add whatever size disc you want to do it, It supports a parity drive so you have some support against failure. The only truly difficult part is that the parity drive must be as big as the largest drive in the box.
In the end only you can decide what works for you. If you want to re-encode your stuff, 2 pass is best. You are going to lose quality, that's unavoidable, But if you're watching it on a TV 12 ft away, You're going to forget about any quality as soon as you get in grossed in anything you're watching.
In my opinion the ideal x265 size/speed/quality is using a tuned slow preset, perhaps with filtering if the source is grainy. A test encode or few should be done to determine an ideal CRF per source.
Since you don't seem very familiar with x265, I would just stick with the defaults in slow preset, but consider using aq-mode 3 or 5 (only available in the patman mod). You can also adjust the aq-strength to help control the resulting size somewhat, I wouldn't go lower than 0.5.
Thank you for the input! I'm unsure what aq-mode is but I'm sure it's somewhere in FastFlix. There's tons of settings in it that I need to look over. The default CRF for HEVC in that program is 22 and I don't know if I should go higher, lower or what but I appreciate your insight.
CRF 18 is usually where I start at, but that is focusing on quality. I'd imagine you would want a higher starting point.
If you want to find out what different options are or do, the docs are a good place to start: https://x265.readthedocs.io/en/master/cli.html