Re-encoding movie library to x265

[Juanitology]

I'm not sure how relevant the topic is but hopefully it'll be useful for someone. First a bit of history: After 2 HDD deaths and very expensive recoveries back in 2013, I bought a Synology DS1512+ NAS filled it with 3 TB drives on a RAID5 configuration. I moved over the 2 4 TB external drives I had and there was plenty of room left over that quickly filled up. So as soon as the 6 TB Red Drives became available I snagged those up. I figured if it took me 10+ years to accumulate 10 TB of data I'd be good for another 10 years with the 22 TB formatted storage. Yet just 2 years later I had less than 100 GB free of space left. That put me in an awkward position since I'm a data hoarder and I don't have the budget, nor do I think it's worth it to rebuild the entire NAS with 8 TB drives. I started scouring for duplicated data, old windows backups, and the like but that was very time intensive for only a few gigs of extra space. I consider myself a videophile, so whenever I can I download 1080p remuxes instead of those shitty 2gb copies. The upside is great video and audio quality, the downside is movies that are routinely in the 20-30 GB size. 

 

On to the main part: one day I found out about HandBrake. After I saw how a 40 GB remuxed bluray could be turned into virtually indistinguishable 5 GB version of itself I was sold. for the better part of 2 months now I've had my PC running nearly 24/7 with HandBrake on for most of that time. I went from less than 100 GB free space to 3.5 TB with virtually no degradation in video and sound quality. And here's the impressive thing: I also added 2.5 TB of 4K films during these 2 months. So x265 saved me a whole 6 TB of space and I'm not even done converting half my library. I calculated the power usage and it comes out to about 40 dollars despite the fact I was already running my PC 12+ hours a day anyways. Now some of you might be lucky enough to have 100 TB servers at home or maybe you're content with the "shitty" 2 GB movies or maybe you're fine just deleting them afterward. I find the convenience of having it ready instead of waiting for a download worth the price. So what I'm saying in a very long and convoluted way is; for those of you out there who share my passion for films, want to watch them in the very best quality possible, and don't have deep pockets to limitless storage, x265 is the answer. Get encoding and save money and space easily. 

 

TLDR x265 HEVC is amazing. If you're low on hdd space just re-encode all your stuff with HandBrake and you'll save a ton of space without sacrificing quality.

[AshleyAshes]

This thread makes me sad.  But I haven't anime eps that are straight remuxs weighing in at 5-6gb/ep.

[paddy-stone]

11 hours ago, Terodius said:

I'm not sure how relevant the topic is but hopefully it'll be useful for someone. First a bit of history: After 2 HDD deaths and very expensive recoveries back in 2013, I bought a Synology DS1512+ NAS filled it with 3 TB drives on a RAID5 configuration. I moved over the 2 4 TB external drives I had and there was plenty of room left over that quickly filled up. So as soon as the 6 TB Red Drives became available I snagged those up. I figured if it took me 10+ years to accumulate 10 TB of data I'd be good for another 10 years with the 22 TB formatted storage. Yet just 2 years later I had less than 100 GB free of space left. That put me in an awkward position since I'm a data hoarder and I don't have the budget, nor do I think it's worth it to rebuild the entire NAS with 8 TB drives. I started scouring for duplicated data, old windows backups, and the like but that was very time intensive for only a few gigs of extra space. I consider myself a videophile, so whenever I can I download 1080p remuxes instead of those shitty 2gb copies. The upside is great video and audio quality, the downside is movies that are routinely in the 20-30 GB size. 

 

On to the main part: one day I found out about HandBrake. After I saw how a 40 GB remuxed bluray could be turned into virtually indistinguishable 5 GB version of itself I was sold. for the better part of 2 months now I've had my PC running nearly 24/7 with HandBrake on for most of that time. I went from less than 100 GB free space to 3.5 TB with virtually no degradation in video and sound quality. And here's the impressive thing: I also added 2.5 TB of 4K films during these 2 months. So x265 saved me a whole 6 TB of space and I'm not even done converting half my library. I calculated the power usage and it comes out to about 40 dollars despite the fact I was already running my PC 12+ hours a day anyways. Now some of you might be lucky enough to have 100 TB servers at home or maybe you're content with the "shitty" 2 GB movies or maybe you're fine just deleting them afterward. I find the convenience of having it ready instead of waiting for a download worth the price. So what I'm saying in a very long and convoluted way is; for those of you out there who share my passion for films, want to watch them in the very best quality possible, and don't have deep pockets to limitless storage, x265 is the answer. Get encoding and save money and space easily. 

 

TLDR x265 HEVC is amazing. If you're low on hdd space just re-encode all your stuff with HandBrake and you'll save a ton of space without sacrificing quality.

What settings are you using in handbrake for your rips, and are you also using video card for helping with re-coding or just CPU? just out of interest. I am a fellow hoarder and love HEVC rips too.

[Speakerator]

thank's, I'll definitely have a look into this.

[Jetfighter808]

15 hours ago, Terodius said:

I'm not sure how relevant the topic is but hopefully it'll be useful for someone. First a bit of history: After 2 HDD deaths and very expensive recoveries back in 2013, I bought a Synology DS1512+ NAS filled it with 3 TB drives on a RAID5 configuration. I moved over the 2 4 TB external drives I had and there was plenty of room left over that quickly filled up. So as soon as the 6 TB Red Drives became available I snagged those up. I figured if it took me 10+ years to accumulate 10 TB of data I'd be good for another 10 years with the 22 TB formatted storage. Yet just 2 years later I had less than 100 GB free of space left. That put me in an awkward position since I'm a data hoarder and I don't have the budget, nor do I think it's worth it to rebuild the entire NAS with 8 TB drives. I started scouring for duplicated data, old windows backups, and the like but that was very time intensive for only a few gigs of extra space. I consider myself a videophile, so whenever I can I download 1080p remuxes instead of those shitty 2gb copies. The upside is great video and audio quality, the downside is movies that are routinely in the 20-30 GB size. 

 

On to the main part: one day I found out about HandBrake. After I saw how a 40 GB remuxed bluray could be turned into virtually indistinguishable 5 GB version of itself I was sold. for the better part of 2 months now I've had my PC running nearly 24/7 with HandBrake on for most of that time. I went from less than 100 GB free space to 3.5 TB with virtually no degradation in video and sound quality. And here's the impressive thing: I also added 2.5 TB of 4K films during these 2 months. So x265 saved me a whole 6 TB of space and I'm not even done converting half my library. I calculated the power usage and it comes out to about 40 dollars despite the fact I was already running my PC 12+ hours a day anyways. Now some of you might be lucky enough to have 100 TB servers at home or maybe you're content with the "shitty" 2 GB movies or maybe you're fine just deleting them afterward. I find the convenience of having it ready instead of waiting for a download worth the price. So what I'm saying in a very long and convoluted way is; for those of you out there who share my passion for films, want to watch them in the very best quality possible, and don't have deep pockets to limitless storage, x265 is the answer. Get encoding and save money and space easily. 

 

TLDR x265 HEVC is amazing. If you're low on hdd space just re-encode all your stuff with HandBrake and you'll save a ton of space without sacrificing quality.

Settings please

[Juanitology]

5 hours ago, paddy-stone said:

What settings are you using in handbrake for your rips, and are you also using video card for helping with re-coding or just CPU? just out of interest. I am a fellow hoarder and love HEVC rips too.

It's best to experiment and play around a bit at first to decide what you like. That said, as far as video goes I use constant quality 20 RF with medium preset and all filters off. And for audio I just use DTS-HD passthrough. x265 is amazing at compressing video, but for audio you still have to rely on AC3 or AAC with pretty shitty 640kbps max bitrates so I don't bother converting it. 
 

edit: forgot to mention, no I don't use my GPU since I have a pretty old one and I don't think even the latest GPUs support x265 hardware encoding natively. So I do it brute force with the CPU. Sure it takes more time, but you get a better result. and if you set the priority to low for the handbrake process, you will barely notice it running in the background even though it's using up most of your CPU cycles.

Edited January 16, 2017 by Terodius
forgot to add info

[Juanitology]

7 hours ago, AshleyAshes said:

This thread makes me sad.  But I haven't anime eps that are straight remuxs weighing in at 5-6gb/ep.

I haven't started re-encoding my TV shows and Animes yet. The problem is Handbrake doesn't have a batch-edit system, so you have to do it file by file and it just takes an assload of time. I wish you could just select an entire folder at a time and say use this settings for all files but you can't. That's why I'm doing my movies first. 

[paddy-stone]

1 hour ago, Terodius said:

It's best to experiment and play around a bit at first to decide what you like. That said, as far as video goes I use constant quality 20 RF with medium preset and all filters off. And for audio I just use DTS-HD passthrough. x265 is amazing at compressing video, but for audio you still have to rely on AC3 or AAC with pretty shitty 640kbps max bitrates so I don't bother converting it. 
 

edit: forgot to mention, no I don't use my GPU since I have a pretty old one and I don't think even the latest GPUs support x265 hardware encoding natively. So I do it brute force with the CPU. Sure it takes more time, but you get a better result. and if you set the priority to low for the handbrake process, you will barely notice it running in the background even though it's using up most of your CPU cycles.

Ahh I see, just was wondering is all... I haven't actually used handbrake for a while now as I got fed up with errors occuring. I mostly use divx converter now for my blu-ray rips, not bad quality but not as quick as using handbrake or better yet dvdfab. But just for using pre-sets divx converter is pretty good, can set it to 4k, 1080 etc HEVC or can use x264, divx and also has pre-sets for some devices too.

I believe you cna set handbrake to do a list, but that's via command line instead of GUI... I'm almost positive that I remember someone doing that years ago, but more recently they were saying about it over on gamers nexus youtube channel. He was saying about ripping videos in a folder that meet certain criteria as their storage was pretty full, this was during the CES event just recently.

[AshleyAshes]

3 hours ago, Terodius said:

I haven't started re-encoding my TV shows and Animes yet. The problem is Handbrake doesn't have a batch-edit system, so you have to do it file by file and it just takes an assload of time. I wish you could just select an entire folder at a time and say use this settings for all files but you can't. That's why I'm doing my movies first. 

I'm just going the opposite direction.  Trying to get the files the closest to their original, remuxes if possible, to minimize any additional degradation from lossy compression.

[Juanitology]

1 hour ago, AshleyAshes said:

I'm just going the opposite direction.  Trying to get the files the closest to their original, remuxes if possible, to minimize any additional degradation from lossy compression.

oh trust me I do the same, I get stuff in the highest quality available even if it takes 1 month to download because there's only 1 seeder. But the reality is I don't have limitless storage. And this is coming from a guy who has a 300 GB movie. No I'm not joking.

 

That said, I am very picky and when I got started I told myself I'd only do it if it reduced the size while still keeping the same quality. That's why I chose RF 20 instead of the 24 they recommend, because with 24 I could see some degradation in detail. With RF20 though, file sizes are only about 10-15% bigger than RF24 and it was virtually impossible for me to tell apart a 40GB remux from a 5-10GB x265 file. I tried looking at stills, blowing up the image, and doing double blind tests. In 9/10 cases I couldn't tell which was which, and in that 1 in 10 the difference was so minute that a 5x difference in file size was not worth it. 

 

Point is, being a videophile and accepting nothing less than the best quality no longer requires massive amounts of storage. Like everything, there's two ways to approach the problem: the brute force approach is just get more hard drives. But the smarter route is just take the time to re-encode. Takes me less than 15min per day to go through 10ish files that I queue up for the day and the rest of the time my PC is doing all the work. It's a minimal time investment, you should give it a try. re-encode an episode and watch them side by side and try to find a difference. Try to play with the settings and find a quality balance you find acceptable.

[AshleyAshes]

2 minutes ago, Terodius said:

That said, I am very picky and when I got started I told myself I'd only do it if it reduced the size while still keeping the same quality. That's why I chose RF 20 instead of the 24 they recommend, because with 24 I could see some degradation in detail. With RF20 though, file sizes are only about 10-15% bigger than RF24 and it was virtually impossible for me to tell apart a 40GB remux from a 5-10GB x265 file. I tried looking at stills, blowing up the image, and doing double blind tests. In 9/10 cases I

 

It's a minimal time investment, you should give it a try. re-encode an episode and watch them side by side and try to find a difference. Try to play with the settings and find a quality balance you find acceptable.

I accept that media consumption is a highly subjective experience an the individuals experience is all that matters to the individual.  That said, please don't say 'keeping the same quality', you're taking content compressed with a lossy compression format and running it through another lossy compression format.  You are not keeping the same quality.  You just aren't.  You are just subjectively not able the appreciate the loss.  To say there is no loss of quality is to mislead others as to the nature of video compression.

 

Further more, the compression settings you're going with is painfully low.  RF20 is a pretty high value and the resultant quality is not that remarkable.  You're also going below state metrics for HEVC.  HEVC is generally regarded as being twice as efficient as h.264, namely, when rendered from the same original source material, HEVC can be on par with h.264 without half the data.  You're going to a quarter or less than that an your source is a lossy original.

 

You're butchering this.  And you can't appreciate that so that's not a problem for you, but it's kinda ugly for you to then suggest the same thing to others and make objectively false claims as to the abilities of HEVC.

[Juanitology]

2 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

I accept that media consumption is a highly subjective experience an the individuals experience is all that matters to the individual.  That said, please don't say 'keeping the same quality', you're taking content compressed with a lossy compression format and running it through another lossy compression format.  You are not keeping the same quality.  You just aren't.  You are just subjectively not able the appreciate the loss.  To say there is no loss of quality is to mislead others as to the nature of video compression.

 

Further more, the compression settings you're going with is painfully low.  RF20 is a pretty high value and the resultant quality is not that remarkable.  You're also going below state metrics for HEVC.  HEVC is generally regarded as being twice as efficient as h.264, namely, when rendered from the same original source material, HEVC can be on par with h.264 without half the data.  You're going to a quarter or less than that an your source is a lossy original.

 

You're butchering this.  And you can't appreciate that so that's not a problem for you, but it's kinda ugly for you to then suggest the same thing to others and make objectively false claims as to the abilities of HEVC.

Yes media consumption is a subjective experience, that said I'd like to point out a few things you're clearly not aware of:

1. Most Blu-Ray films are encoded with MPEG-2, that's the reason why the files in blu-rays are .mt2s and they're created with h.262 compression. Because a Blu-Ray player from 2006 still has to be able to play a disc bought in 2016, they have not changed that standard. So right off the bat you're wrong, when you re-encode a remux you're not doing it from h.264

2. I arrived at RF20 as being a good balance after testing all the way from RF25 to RF10, and as objectively as I possibly could (with blown up stills, color analysis, and the look overall and fluidity) there was no benefit I could see going beyond RF20. That said I did mention people should tinker with the settings and figure out what they thought was the best setting for their taste.

3. As I mentioned, Blu-Ray is encoded in h.262 which is an awful codec. h.264 is regarded to be twice as efficient as h.262, and h.265 is around twice as efficient as h.264 so by doing a little bit of math you can figure out x265 is about four times as efficient as the codec used in Blu-Rays. When on top of that 4X improvement you remove all the audio tracks you don't care about and bonus content if you don't care for it, you're looking at a 5X or more reduction in file size. 

 

I hope you've learned a couple things from reading this post. Firstly that x265 is actually a great way to store a big library in a relatively small server. And secondly, don't try to argue topics you're ignorant about by pretending to be knowledgeable. You just come off as a massive tool. 

[AshleyAshes]

17 minutes ago, Terodius said:

1. Most Blu-Ray films are encoded with MPEG-2, that's the reason why the files in blu-rays are .mt2s and they're created with h.262 compression. Because a Blu-Ray player from 2006 still has to be able to play a disc bought in 2016, they have not changed that standard. So right off the bat you're wrong, when you re-encode a remux you're not doing it from h.264

Your fundamental understandings here is flawed.

 

First, while MT2S is the 'Blu-ray Disc Audio-Video (BDAV) MPEG-2 Transport Stream (M2TS)' but this does not mean that the video is encoded in MPEG-2.  Do not confuse it with the 'MPEG-2 Transport Stream' which commonly uses the '.ts' extension.  The M2TS is a container format, just like AVI or MKV or OGM or MOV or others.  The M2TS transport stream is capable of storing MPEG-2, MPEG-4 AVC (h.264), and VC-1. (And a bunch of audio codecs, but let's not get muddy in the details) All three of these formats are in the Blu-Ray standard and all Blu-ray players are fully capable of playback of any of these formats. You are correct that the Blu-Ray standard must ensure universal support for the decoding hardware for all machines from all ages (Let's ignore that BD-J bullshit for simplicity), but you are incorrect in your belief that MPEG-2 is the only format possible in a Blu-Ray.

 

Moving on.

 

While there three possible compression codecs that a Blu-ray can use, MPEG-2 has been all but abandoned and was only really used in early Blu-ray discs when authoring tools were in their infancy.  Some collectors even specifically collect these mostly obscure MPEG-2 discs.  The vast majority use MPEG-4 AVC (h.264) or VC-1 with MPEG-4 AVC (h.264) being the lions share but VC-1 not being uncommon.

 

I will concede that I am guilty of overgeneralizing by saying Blu-Rays are all h.264, only the majority are, but I was trying to keep things simple.  You are dead wrong in your assertion that all Blu-ray discs are MPEG-2 when only an extreme minority use MPEG-2.

 

To be clear, no, I am not 'right off the bat wrong', you just don't know anything about the Blu-ray Video Disc.  Not to 'pull rank', but I literally work in the film industry.  Gods of Egypt, Ghostbusters 2016, Pete's Dragon 2016, Independence Day: Resurgence, Fantastic Beasts, just to name some of the movies I've worked on in the last year.  I know a thing or two about compression and disc formats, it's kinda literally my field.

[Juanitology]

2 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

Not to 'pull rank; but I literally work in the film industry.  Ghostbusters 2016

Cool, how does it feel to make literally the shittiest movie of the year?

[Juanitology]

Also if you work in the film industry you're probably able to get films in DCP format anyways, why do you even care about this topic? As I said in the very first post, this is for people who don't have the money for archival quality film storage but still want to enjoy films they way they're meant to. 

[AshleyAshes]

1 minute ago, Terodius said:

Cool, how does it feel to make literally the shittiest movie of the year?

As someone who saw Ghostbusters in 1984 (I am prepared to argue that being asleep in my car seat at the drive in counts), loved the franchise all through childhood, even had The Ghostbusters Fire house even though it totally clashed with my Barbie's, who even bought Extreme Ghostbusters on DVD when only 13 episodes were ever released, who put together an actual Ghostbusters uniform using screen accurate elements, including my own name on that uniform, to have actually touched and been part of the creation of part of that franchise in my adulthood... It feels absolutely fucking amazing.

[AshleyAshes]

1 minute ago, Terodius said:

Also if you work in the film industry you're probably able to get films in DCP format anyways

'How to get black listed from the entire industry in five mins'.  No, no I do not have access to DCPs.  They're actually pretty heavily controlled.  There's a reason that nearly no DCPs have ever leaked online. Even the only 'known' commercial DCP that's leaked, Hateful Eight, is questioned by many in the piracy scene.

[Juanitology]

25 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

'How to get black listed from the entire industry in five mins'.  No, no I do not have access to DCPs.  They're actually pretty heavily controlled.  There's a reason that nearly no DCPs have ever leaked online. Even the only 'known' commercial DCP that's leaked, Hateful Eight, is questioned by many in the piracy scene.

Really? I figured they were just not available commercially because of cost constraints. So is there any point along the editing chain where the film is actually in a plain non-encrypted video file like the one they put in a DCP?

[AshleyAshes]

7 hours ago, Terodius said:

Really? I figured they were just not available commercially because of cost constraints. So is there any point along the editing chain where the film is actually in a plain non-encrypted video file like the one they put in a DCP?

No, DCPs are controlled media.  The location of every drive is known and tracked to prevent them to go missing.  My office couldn't even get a DCP of Fantastic Beasts to have the employees watch in the theater office theater for security reasons.

 

Data security is very important in the film industry.  People can't have phones on the production floors of offices.  ID badges that track who goes in and out.  Reels, which are 'just video files' are watermarked up the wazoo.  Workstations don't have internet access, only intranet.  For an individual to even attempt to smuggle data home, they would have to have nothing to lose, because they would be fired, blacklisted and sued.  Personally, I like being employed.

[Mikensan]

Is it possible that maybe not being able to tell the difference between high quality rips vs compressed is due to the TV/Monitor just not being high end? I know a cheap TV can make anything look like crap. I know some mid-range TVs will tamper with the video quality in an attempt to up-scale or have some "true motion" bullcrap that could affect quality too.

 

Most of my collection, depending on the length, range from 10-20gb and I'm very happy with the playback on my $600 65" LG TV (definitely a cheap TV).

 

While I'm somebody who certainly enjoys viewing movies at their highest possible quality, my bar isn't quite so high. I just don't have the budget for a high end TV to truly enjoy it.

 

Since there's at least two of you who know something about encoding, if given information such as the below - what are some key properties to look at to discern if a movie is going to be decent (which I suppose is relative)? (Removed a few lines due to this forum's sensitive policy on.. stuff)

Quote

 

RELEASE NAME.....: C******e.2016.1080p.BluRay.DTS-HD.MA.5.1.x264-iFT
RELEASE SIZE.....: 13.3 GiB
RUNTIME..........: 1 h 52 min 10s
VIDEO CODEC......: AVC x264 2-PASS
FRAMERATE........: 23.976 fps
BITRATE..........: 13.6 Mb/s
RESOLUTION.......: 1920 x 804
SAMPLE...........: Included
CHAPTERS.........: Included
AUDIO............: ENGLISH DTS-HD.MA 6Chan @ 3363 kbps
SOURCE...........: MT < Thanks >
SUBTITLES........: SUP-English-Spanish
RELEASE DATE.....: 16/1/2017
ENCODER..........: Du

X264 INFO

profile High, level 4.1

frame I:914   Avg QP:13.14  size:205614
frame P:37581 Avg QP:14.54  size:125545
frame B:122887 Avg QP:16.73  size: 52875
consecutive B-frames:  3.1%  4.2% 12.5%  9.4% 17.0% 47.4%  3.6%  0.7%  0.4%  0.3%  0.3%  1.0%

encoded 161382 frames, 3.886 fps, 13553.65 kb/s, 10875 MB

ENCODE SETTINGS

cabac=1 / ref=5 / deblock=1:-3:-3 / analyse=0x3:0x133 / me=umh / subme=11 
/ psy=1 / fade_compensate=0.00 / psy_rd=1.05:1.05 / mixed_ref=1 / me_range=48 
/ chroma_me=1 / trellis=2 / 8x8dct=1 / cqm=0 / deadzone=21,11 / fast_pskip=1 
/ chroma_qp_offset=-4 / threads=16 / lookahead_threads=4 / sliced_threads=0 
/ nr=0 / decimate=0 / interlaced=0 / bluray_compat=0 / constrained_intra=0 
/ fgo=0 / bframes=11 / b_pyramid=2 / b_adapt=2 / b_bias=0 / direct=3 / weightb=1 
/ open_gop=0 / weightp=2 / keyint=240 / keyint_min=23 / scenecut=40 / intra_refresh=0 
/ rc_lookahead=150 / rc=2pass / mbtree=0 / bitrate=13570 / ratetol=1.0 / qcomp=0.60 
/ qpmin=0:0:0 / qpmax=69:69:69 / qpstep=4 / cplxblur=20.0 / qblur=0.5 / vbv_maxrate=62500 
/ vbv_bufsize=78125 / nal_hrd=none / filler=0 / ip_ratio=1.20 / pb_ratio=1.30 / aq=2:0.80 
/ aq-sensitivity=10.00 / aq-factor=1.00:1.00:1.00 / aq2=0 / aq3=0

 

 

[dalekphalm]

12 hours ago, Terodius said:

Also if you work in the film industry you're probably able to get films in DCP format anyways, why do you even care about this topic? As I said in the very first post, this is for people who don't have the money for archival quality film storage but still want to enjoy films they way they're meant to. 

I'll back up @AshleyAshes here. I ripped near enough my entire Blu-Ray (And some HD-DVD's!) collection using MakeMKV and Handbrake. And the vast majority of the Blu-Ray's were AVC (h.264). I don't even recall if I came across an MPEG2 or VC-1 Encode. VC-1 was, if I recall, much more popular with HD-DVD though - but even at the best of times, those are tricky to rip, due to not a lot of dev time spent working out glitches in the ripping software. MakeMKV does an alright job, but half my HD-DVD's couldn't be ripped. I ended up getting rid of most of them.

 

I think the only HD-DVD I still have is the Limited Collectors Edition Blade Runner, complete with collectors edition briefcase storage:

 

1 hour ago, Mikensan said:

Is it possible that maybe not being able to tell the difference between high quality rips vs compressed is due to the TV/Monitor just not being high end? I know a cheap TV can make anything look like crap. I know some mid-range TVs will tamper with the video quality in an attempt to up-scale or have some "true motion" bullcrap that could affect quality too.

 

Most of my collection, depending on the length, range from 10-20gb and I'm very happy with the playback on my $600 65" LG TV (definitely a cheap TV).

 

While I'm somebody who certainly enjoys viewing movies at their highest possible quality, my bar isn't quite so high. I just don't have the budget for a high end TV to truly enjoy it.

 

Since there's at least two of you who know something about encoding, if given information such as the below - what are some key properties to look at to discern if a movie is going to be decent (which I suppose is relative)? (Removed a few lines due to this forum's sensitive policy on.. stuff)

 

The quality of the TV itself makes a huge difference. When I bought my 1080p LG Plasma TV, it was night and day compared to any TV I'd seen before. Sure it's not a Pioneer Kuro or a Panasonic VT or ZT series Plasma, but it's still a damn good Plasma TV. Objectively better picture quality over all but the most high end LCD TV's (Quantum Dot or similar).

 

As for the settings, looking at Codec, bitrate, and audio stream are good places to start. 13Mbps is a good wide bitrate, especially for AVC. It also has HD Audio, which is usually an indication that it came from a good source (An actual Blu-Ray rip).

[Juanitology]

9 hours ago, Mikensan said:

Is it possible that maybe not being able to tell the difference between high quality rips vs compressed is due to the TV/Monitor just not being high end? I know a cheap TV can make anything look like crap. I know some mid-range TVs will tamper with the video quality in an attempt to up-scale or have some "true motion" bullcrap that could affect quality too.

 

I usually watch movies on my 27" LED monitor. It's a VA panel, not the best in the world for color range or accuracy but it's decent enough and has really nice contrast (3000:1 static) while I'm waiting for a worthwhile 4K screen to come along before I upgrade. And sure you can ask why on earth do I have 4K rips already if I don't have a 1080p screen? That's because downsampled 4K looks much better, and I am also looking toward the future. Hopefully this year I make the jump. I already had a sizeable 1080p collection back in 2008 and it wasn't till 2010 that I had my first 1080p screen

[Mikensan]

On 1/17/2017 at 7:33 PM, Terodius said:

I usually watch movies on my 27" LED monitor. It's a VA panel, not the best in the world for color range or accuracy but it's decent enough and has really nice contrast (3000:1 static) while I'm waiting for a worthwhile 4K screen to come along before I upgrade. And sure you can ask why on earth do I have 4K rips already if I don't have a 1080p screen? That's because downsampled 4K looks much better, and I am also looking toward the future. Hopefully this year I make the jump. I already had a sizeable 1080p collection back in 2008 and it wasn't till 2010 that I had my first 1080p screen

So then it's still entirely possible that your compression would be undetected when viewing the 4k streams on a 1080p resolution, but viewing them on a 4k monitor you could possibly notice the loss?  

[Juanitology]

4 hours ago, Mikensan said:

So then it's still entirely possible that your compression would be undetected when viewing the 4k streams on a 1080p resolution, but viewing them on a 4k monitor you could possibly notice the loss?  

All the 4K films I downloaded were already in x265. I'm only converting my 1080p library

[Zodiark1593]

I would love to go x265, but aside from Nala, I've nothing that will actually play h.265 video with any competency. So no space savings for me.