Hello! I recently listened to a podcast that talked about how storing media files in .av1 format is very efficient and storage-friendly. I’ve been storing my files in .mkv format, but now I’m considering using Handbrake or a similar service to convert all my video files to .av1 if it’s more compressed than .mkv. So;
- What format do you store your media?
- What is the optimal way of storing media?
- Do you use handbrake or similar services (feel free to suggest) to convert media files?
If you take the plunge to re-encode, check out the self hosted app tdarr, very handy for large libraries, or watching folders for new files, plus you can distribute the load to other computers if you have any spare headroom.
Encoded over 20tb in a few days with three machines and saved around 6tb of space.
Another recommendation for tdarr, set it up in January and let it transcode away, going to h265 for all my media - saved me over 40TB of space so far and I haven’t noticed a massive drop In quality or had any playback issues.
Ah nice recommendation, have seen that name been mentioned before but wasnt sure what it was for. Now I know! :)
With docker-conpose it took less than 20 mins to setup the system across several machines and have it working. Definitely worth investigating.
Pro tip 1, use it to strip out any languages you don’t need and other optimisation techniques like reordering streams will save space and reduce transcoding overheads.
Pro tip 2, You’ll encoded fastest if you can offload to a GPU, I did this in two gaming pcs with decent albeit 7 year old, Nvidia cards, but you’ll get slightly better results (barely noticeable quality wise, but slightly smaller) through a CPU encode, it’ll just takes about 7 to 20 times as long.
Thanks again for the addtitional insights on this! I was indeed planning up picking up an Intel Arc 310 or a 380 later on as they are super cheap and seem to be excellent at hardware transcoding :)