Transcoding anything >720p is painful.

I run ancient hardware for desktop/laptop >10yrs old apple stuff running linux. I consume media mainly via rpi4 or android.

What’s a minimum level system capable of trans-coding 4k video to x265 in at the very least real time? Is there a tiny trans-coding device out there somewhere?

Would a NUC do? How old or new to churn out 4k x265

Can I avoid hardware? Are cloud gpu’s a thing?

  • Dandroid@dandroid.app
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    1 year ago

    I converted all my ripped Blu Rays over the past couple of weeks. I just used ffmpeg. It took a a while to find the right options to keep subtitles and multiple audio channels and such, but eventually I got it all perfect.

    I found that using my GPU made the quality absolute shit. It was about 3x faster than using my CPU though.

      • Dandroid@dandroid.app
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        1 year ago

        I put it in a script, so I’ll need to check my server later.

        Do we have a remindme bot here?

          • Dandroid@dandroid.app
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            1 year ago

            Your reminder worked! Here is the command I used. I put it in a script, and would pass it the file I wanted to convert.

            ffmpeg -i "$1" -vcodec libx265 -crf 28 -map 0 -c:s copy "${1%.*}.h265.mkv" > ./convert_logs 2>&1 < /dev/null &

            If I called this script convert_to_h265.sh, I would call it with convert_to_h265.sh some_video.mkv

            Here is an explanation for the options I used:

            ffmpeg is the command
            -i "$1" is the input file. In this case, the argument to the script
            -vcodec libx265 is specifying the plugin to use as libx265
            -crf 28 is specifying the quality/compression rate. I found this one to be pretty acceptable
            -map 0 makes it select ALL audio tracks and ALL subtitle tracks
            -c:s copy copies subtitle tracks
            "${1%.*}.h265.mkv" specifies the output file. In this case, everything up to the last dot, then replace the extension with ‘.h265.mkv’
            > ./convert_logs 2>&1 < /dev/null tells the program to output to a log file instead of writing to your terminal. It also sets the input to nothing, and without that, it won’t work in a script for some reason.
            & tells the whole thing run in the background so it doesn’t hold up your terminal. You can even close your terminal and do other things and check back on it later.

            You can monitor the progress with tail -f convert_logs

            If you want to get fancy, you can even put this in a loop to run on all the files that end in .mkv in the current directory:

            for i in *.mkv; do
                   ffmpeg -i "$i" -vcodec libx265 -crf 28 -map 0 -c:s copy "${i%.*}.h265.mkv" > ./convert_logs 2>&1 < /dev/null
            done
            

            And if you want to get mega fancy, you can have it run recursively for all files that end in .mkv in the current directory and all files in all child directories.

            shopt -s globstar
            for i in **/*.mkv; do
                    ffmpeg -i "$i" -vcodec libx265 -crf 28 -map 0 -c:s copy "${i%.*}.h265.mkv" > ./convert_logs 2>&1 < /dev/null
            done
            

            If you do either of the latter two, I would put it in a script. Let’s call the first one convert_all_to_h265.sh and the second one convert_all_to_h265_recursively.sh. Call them with convert_all_to_h265.sh & and convert_all_to_h265_recursively.sh & if you want to run them in the background.

            You also might want to play around with the -crf 28 value if you want more compression or more quality. The lower the number, the better the quality. It needs to be a value between 0 and 51.

            • MolochAlter@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Dude this is the most thorough explanation of a single command line I’ve ever had!

              Thanks for the effort, and the line itself.

              • Dandroid@dandroid.app
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                1 year ago

                I put a hours of research into this, and I felt like documentation was difficult to understand, so I wanted to pass along what I’ve learned! I hope it works for you.

      • Nawor3565@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        If you’re actually ripping bluerays, I would highly recommend using MakeMKV. It’s technically paid software but while it’s in beta you can can a free license key from their forums. BluRays can be formatted oddly and include a bunch of crap you probably don’t want (preroll ads, etc), so when I tried to rip one with jusy ffmpeg it was a pain, but MakeMKV deals with most of that for you and gets a 1-to-1 copy of the movie files + anything like captions and alternate audip tracks.