I’m getting back into digital collecting after pretty much exhausting the local thriftstores of any movies I wanted to watch / own.
I was thinking of burning everything to DVD but then I came to my senses and just installed Jellyfin.
Question:
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What video file sizes do you guys download and why?
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And what is the correlation between video size and quality? I see some wild variations in file sizes even for the same res.
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Who are y’alls downloading 20+GB movies? Are you storing all that or are you downmixing? Are you stealing your harddrives out of the recycle bin?
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Any shortcuts for getting rich blacks for space scenes? Do I just need to suck it up eat the bytes? (I’m thinking of going this route for BSG and can’t remember if they go for video grain in space or true film black).
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What is the obvious thing I clearly don’t understand by asking these questions?
So for me, it seems for file size, about 700MB / 90 minutes is about as low as I can go, and arguably it’s too low because I’m sometimes distracted by the low quality.
I’m a little confused by what’s going on because I’ll often watch a DVD that’s being upscaled by the player and have no complaints, and I think that’s base 480 or lower, but a labelled 720p can have some distractingly low res.
For my high end, 2GB at 1080p is about as high as I care to go unless it’s some crazy high quality cinematographic shit like Lawrence or Dune.
You mean you download a massive file and shrink it down yourself?
Do you have an recommended encorders for B&W film? Seems like an easy place to pick up some space savings while retaining or improving over a general full color codec.
If it’s something I really want. Absolutely.
These days handbrake is pretty much all you need. We’ve come a long way since my days moderating over on the Doom 9 Forum way back in the early 2000s.
Codec wise there really isn’t anything that would be more recommended for black and white. Black and white are colors. 16 million Shades of Black and White are still 16 million colors if that makes any sense. So a color encoder is generally going to do just as well. You’re not really going to save that much just because something is black and white.
The codec that you might want to choose will generally depend more on the resolution of your content, and the hardware you intend to play it back on. Older Hardware might only support h264. Also DVDs, anything newer than h264 doesn’t really save you a lot of space. And takes more time to encode. H264 also uses smaller macro blocks which are generally preferable for lower resolution. When it comes to HD or 4K sources. Then h265 or AV1 should probably be your go-to’s. Unless again you are limited by playback hardware.
The settings again depend a lot on your content. If it’s largely static scenes with Talking Heads. You can get by with some pretty insanely low bit rates. If it’s an action movie with lots of motion all over the place explosions etc etc etc. You’re going to need every bit of bitrate you can get.
When it comes to basic settings? Under the video dialogue in handbrake. Whenever you select and encoder towards the bottom left there is a slider labeled preset. Which is sort of misleading. It is the motion estimation quality. You would generally never want it set to anything higher than medium and preferably closer to slower. As the name implies slower is slower. But it performs much better motion estimation. Which will create less blocking and artifacts when constrained for bitrate. Leaving more for those blacks which are often the first thing sacrificed.
Bitrate wise. And easy rule of thumb is previous generations bit rate. Ripping DVD in h264 a VCD bitrate of 1–2 Mbps is pretty solid. 1080p? DVD bitrates of 5-9 Mbps in h265 or AV1 will save lots of space and keep excellent video quality. 4k, 20 to 35 Mbps h265 or AV1. A bit wasteful but generally visually lossless. If you take the time and do 2 pass you can go lower still.
I’ve used these setting for re-encoding and the quality is very good. Even DVDs look better in many cases. Haven’t done any B&W though. Be warned h.265 encoding is very cpu intensive e.g. with my Ryzen 7 7700x re-encoding a bluray movie takes about 90-120 mins at 1080p. Down scaling will reduce that time.