Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ @lemmy.dbzer0.com beta_tester @lemmy.ml 1y ago

A script to convert all 264 to 265?

Does someone have a script that converts all videos files from 264 to 265 and changes the name?

Even an attempt at it would be appreciated

looks like I will not convert anything at all.

It is definitely not worth converting x264, even less x265, to av1, if you are the only consumer. Just think about it. To get any "significant" space gains, while keeping a close to original quality (you will inevitably lose some detail), you need to spend maybe at least 3-4x more time encoding than the actual total video length, probably more, maybe 5x. Taking an average of 3GB/hour, 2TB is about 650 hours. x5 that's like 3250 hours. An 8 core ryzen will have like 150W total system load encoding av1. 3250h * 0.15 kWh =~ 500 kWh. 500 kWh * 0.15$/kWh (I took an optimistic electricity cost for these days, might be a lot more depending where you live) = $75 in electricity costs. Setting encodes, moving files around, will also take up some significant amount of time. You will gain maybe 1TB, if compressing audio to opus as well, less than that you will have significant video quality losses. 1TB of hdd space is worth $15 these days. And you don't waste time/electricity+money/video quality.

So it's only worth to get existing published encodes of the material you own, of if you are planning on publishing yourself. Or just for fun, if you want to experiment and encode one movie to see what's the best you can get out of av1.

source: https://www.reddit.com/r/AV1/comments/ymrs5v/id_like_to_encode_my_entire_library_to_av1/

36 comments

What about

#!/bin/bash find . -type f -name '*.mp4' -exec sh -c 'ffmpeg -i "$0" -c:v libx265 "${0%.mp4}-conv.mp4""' {} \;
- Kind of. But this is encoded using CPU and will be time consuming. Search for FFMPEG GPU acceleration. The installation (building) will take some time but the time saved during mass conversion of videos will be worth it. I believe FFMPEG supports RCOM on Amd and Cuda on Nvidia . So any gpu should be fine.
  
  I generally think that for storage/archiving you should use CPU encoding and only use GPU for things like transcoding where real-time results are crucial.
  
  GPU encoding is a lot worse quality than CPU, and you can’t change the settings to what you want. Better to just accept the extra time requirement to get a better result.
  
  Thxn i'll have another look into it!
- That looks promising. Just keep in mind that this will take a very long time to run. I believe there is a *arr out there that can manage this / show progress, but the name escapes me
  
  I think it's Tdarr you're thinking of.
Just keep in mind you're going to lose quality. Any time you compress something in a lossy format is going to get worse.

Another note, if you're not worried about quality loss, you might look into AV1 over h265. Much better compression. Though, that might not work with your setup.
- Thx for reminding me.
  
  Is it ready for prime time already?
  
  Short answer yes. Much longer. More complex answer. Mostly. If you're planning on your devices being able to support hardware decoding and large resolutions/ high frame rates. Sit-top boxes and appliances are not quite there right now. I believe the newer Chromecast HD absolutely supports av1. But most of the older Chromecast including Chromecast TV do not support it directly. So it will have to be re-encoded to be streamed.
  
  That said, the codec itself is fantastic. As an example for animated content, especially. I have some super high quality rips of the old old cartoon from the '80s of the Ghostbusters franchise. We're talking nearly a gigabyte encoded in h264 for a 22 minute episode. At SD resolution. Upscaling them to 720p and encoding them with av1. And a constant rate factor of about 40. They've been coming in between 80 and 200 MB in episode depending upon how much movement there is etc. The one thing with av1 is That as it degrades it sort of smooths everything which works out perfectly for animation most of the time. It can work for live action etc. As well. But you will encounter smoothing as detail is lost. But overall, it is much more preferable to the H style codex so far
  
  I would try making one video into the format you want and see if it plays where you want it.
I use a handbrake container and a watch folder. Just move what you want converted to the watch folder and handbrake does the rest.
- That's a great idea!! Thanks!
- That's more work at the first glance since it's not just a couple of videos
Check out Tdarr
- Agreed. I've converted my library all to 265 using Tdarr, I'm up to 11.5 TB of saved space. I like having all my media be uniform for my Plex server, and Tdarr is a nice and easy tool to achieve it
- I did that a long time ago and I was more pleased with unmanic but I've got one job and that's just to convert 264 to 265 which should be straightforward and easy and many people should want this as ee all have limited storage
https://github.com/Unmanic/unmanic
I use tdarr for my large scale conversions to AV1 but I use shutterencoder for everything else. It's like handbrake but friendly for working in large batches and the UI is really nice https://www.shutterencoder.com/en/ It will add H265 to the end of the name too
- Thx, I guess I move to av1 then since many recommend it and say it's ready for prime time
  
  If whatever you're doing works with av1 then I'd say go for it. I do AV1 for Plex since all of my devices can hardware decode, however I keep my own videos at h264 software encoded (for smaller filesizes) since Synology photos doesn't support AV1.
Maybe a script using ffmpeg can be made. For further time saving, do it using ffmpeg hardware acceleration using gpu.
- Like this? https://lemmy.ml/comment/7587233
  
  I can't use hardware acceleration as I've got an nvidia card and I wasted already many hours on it. Buying another card and smashing the old one against the wall would be better
  
  Why exactly can't you use hardware acceleration with an nvidia card? We have Arch Linux with a Quadro P400 and using the nvidia driver Tdarr runs super smoothly. The way to get all your content in x265 is just by decoding and encoding, which Tdarr, Handbrake etc can do. But it's one stream per nvenc/nvdec at a time so it takes time.
  
  You can use hardware acceleration with nvidia cards and ffmpeg with a 980 or better (YUV420), more info here
  
  A guide from nvidia
I have several media libraries so I set up file flows to only perform compression based on a few specific rules. I never used to compress, but 2 years ago I ran out of space and had no money to upgrade disks, so I started compressing, intending for it to be temporary until I could add space. but it became part of my servers automatic setup and it works great.

TV show episodes between 3 and 5gb that aren't already H265 get compressed with RF21 H265, but files over 5gb get RF22. only files older than 6 weeks get compressed to give people a chance to watch them in original quality. the compression flow also includes making a stereo aac downmix audio track for added compatibility. so anything that is already H265 or low bitrate is left untouched to avoid unnecessary compression.

Movies get a similar treatment and H264 files under 5gb are ignored, 5-20gb gets RF21 and 20gb plus gets RF22. All of this is done with 10bit H265 as it tends to look a little better. the amount of compression I;m doing is pretty small, a 3gb TV show for example might end up being 2gb or so, and a 30gb movie will usually end up around 12-15gb at most. I could push harder, particularly for movies but I don't see a need as i've saved 13TB so far with this setup.

If sonarr/radarr download new versions of something (a TV show gets released on bluray for example) it will go back into the loop and get compressed again, but now it will be a higher quality.

4K shows and movies are always left untouched, they are in a separate library and are only accessible to certain clients.
I use ffmpeg batch AV converter, you can convert multiple files automatically, its great for that.
I've made several, what are your needs?
- Convert all 264 videos to 265 format
  
  Change file names (replace the 264 with 265)
  
  Got one ready made for that but I'm not where the script is atm, I'll post it later tonight. It can be used directly or as a gnome/cinnamon context menu script, one or many files at once.

36 comments