Converting to H265

[Guarino]

Hi everyone, over the past years i've managed to create a good library of videos, some recorded and edited by myself, others are Just rips of blurays i had on hand. Problem is i am getting cose to fill up my 2 TB HDD, and i don't want to get rid of anything Just yet (i have plans to build a good NAS, but not now). To Save up some space i thought I can just encode all the videos in h265. What is the best way? Encode directly from h264 to h265? Or to a lossless codec First and than to h265?

 

I made a try yesterday, encoded One of the rips directly to h265 with fast preset and quality 14. Ended up saving "only" 2GB (from like 8GB to 6GB). Looking forward for your suggestion.

[deadaccount69]

Don't go to lossless first. It's unnecessary. What are your system specs? Unless you have a very modern cpu, you'll be spending a long time to reencode all of those. The other option is using the hardware encoder on nvidia graphics cards. That'll be able to encode directly to h.265 fairly quickly but it simply won't be as efficient as CPU encoding so the quality-file size ratio will only be slightly better than a well-optimized h.264.

[paddy-stone]

I'd just buy another HDD personally. Especially as you are planning on buying a NAS anyway some time in the future, so if you made a start on getting a HDD or 2 now it won't matter, you can get a 3TB WD red for around £95 in the UK.

Anyway, so if you go that route you then don't have to recode your media, which I assume you have at the required bitrate for your preference?  Then when you do buy a NAS, you can just transfer the media to that, and keep what disks you have in the PC for backups. You really need to have backups BTW.

[mariushm]

H265 will only bring you about 10-20% disk space savings for the same quality.

 

You've already lost some detail going from 40+ GB bluray to 8 GB h264 encodings, and h265 encoders make different decisions about what should remain in the video (what your eyes will miss or not) so you'll have another layer of losses added to what h264 encoding process already did.

 

It's not worth the time and the loss of quality for so little disk space saved. You'd probably gain almost as much by converting the audio tracks from 5.1 or 7.1 DTS Master or whatever is used this day which typically uses 1.5 mbps , down to 5.1 Opus or AAC which will do very decent results with just 64-80 kbps per channel , or 320-384 kbps of audio bitrate. You'll save around 700 MB - 1 GB of data this way and unless you have a really high end system or some system that can take the DTS Master through some optical / coax digital and decode it for you, then you won't really notice the differences.

 

My advise would be to just make an effort and buy a decent 3-4 TB hard drive. Eventually you're still going to need the extra disk space.

[Guarino]

1 hour ago, ryan27968 said:

Don't go to lossless first. It's unnecessary. What are your system specs? Unless you have a very modern cpu, you'll be spending a long time to reencode all of those. The other option is using the hardware encoder on nvidia graphics cards. That'll be able to encode directly to h.265 fairly quickly but it simply won't be as efficient as CPU encoding so the quality-file size ratio will only be slightly better than a well-optimized h.264.

I have hands on 2 i7 4790k rigs which are used only some hours each day, so they can spend the rest of the time encoding the video. So what settings do you advice me to use for the x265 encoder, to maintain good enough quality while saving some space?

1 hour ago, paddy-stone said:

I'd just buy another HDD personally. 

 

1 hour ago, mariushm said:

My advise would be to just make an effort and buy a decent 3-4 TB hard drive. Eventually you're still going to need the extra disk space.

It's an external HDD...I've backups of the things I really care all over the place. I just want to save space on that HDD since it is portable and I can easily bring it to friend's house and on trips.

[paddy-stone]

2 hours ago, Guarino said:

I have hands on 2 i7 4790k rigs which are used only some hours each day, so they can spend the rest of the time encoding the video. So what settings do you advice me to use for the x265 encoder, to maintain good enough quality while saving some space?

 

It's an external HDD...I've backups of the things I really care all over the place. I just want to save space on that HDD since it is portable and I can easily bring it to friend's house and on trips.

Ahh OK, sorry I misunderstood. You will need HDDs for the NAS you want to buy/build though, so might be an option if you have no other choice.

With converting/recoding them, it's a long process unless you don't care if they lose quality or have glitches in them... you don't want to delete the ones you have until you've checked the recoded files to see if they're OK IMO. For simple recodes you could use DIVX converter, despite the name (it's because the company is older now), they actually have some good presets for recoding if you want to give it a shot.

[Guarino]

1 hour ago, paddy-stone said:

With converting/recoding them, it's a long process unless you don't care if they lose quality or have glitches in them... you don't want to delete the ones you have until you've checked the recoded files to see if they're OK IMO. For simple recodes you could use DIVX converter, despite the name (it's because the company is older now), they actually have some good presets for recoding if you want to give it a shot.

I actually care about loosing quality and I don't really have time limitation (even if it takes a month to re-encode all of them, I'm still ok with it). For the Blu-Ray rips especially. So I think it will be better to go with something like HandBrake or StaxRip. So I am looking for some good settings to encode without loosing too much quality. Can you help?

[paddy-stone]

6 hours ago, Guarino said:

I actually care about loosing quality and I don't really have time limitation (even if it takes a month to re-encode all of them, I'm still ok with it). For the Blu-Ray rips especially. So I think it will be better to go with something like HandBrake or StaxRip. So I am looking for some good settings to encode without loosing too much quality. Can you help?

Seriously, try out the divx software, it has presets already for h.265/x265 HEVC thst you can choose and then adjust if needed. Handbrake is good software but it's not as user friendly. If you really must, try setting the output file size you want and see what the recode looks like. Then adjust if needed.