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?
So I think you may not know about quick sync, an Intel transcoding acceleration feature of Intel gpus in Intel CPUs.
https://handbrake.fr/docs/en/latest/technical/video-qsv.html
There’s information about it for I think plex and handbrake and ffmpeg in general. This is how some people do real time transcoding for media servers. But I’m not an expert. I just hope you can be guided with easier search terms.
What a great example for the community you are, my guy. I love it.
Speaking up, knowing you don’t have the full answer but can at least point in a general direction, is HUGE in a community full of constant and rapid change where the previous years information could already be outdated or even obsolete.
What are you transcoding from, and what is your reason for wanting to do this? It might not be worth th effort. Lossy to lossy transcoding is already not ideal, and hardware encorders end up trading either size or quality in exchange for speed. I’ve played with NVENC h.265 a lot and found the end results weren’t really any smaller than what x264 gives me for similar quality, so I just use x265 and deel with the slower encodes.
It may be cheaper to just buy more storage.
Seconded, depending on what your goals are with transcoding, you might want to reconsider your strategy.
Hardware encoding (with a GPU) is mostly useful for realtime transcoding applications like streaming video. There are definitely some caviats that come with the realtime performance, and you’ll find that NVENC encoded video is almost always inferior to the slower equivalent software encoded variants.
So let’s talk codecs: While h.265 might seem like the holy grail, it is way more computationally intensive than h.264 is. In some cases the difference in encoding time will even be as high as 3-5x. Not really worth it if all you’re gaining is a slightly lower filesize.
Your results will vary by the media you’re encoding, by your encoder quality settings, tuning and encoding speed. As a rule of thumb: slower encoding speeds equal more efficiently compressed video (a.k.a. relatively higher quality for lower file size).
Handbrake is my choice of software for encoding video. It includes pretty much everything you could ever want if you’re not looking for niche codecs and exotic video formats.
I find myself mostly using x264 because it is relatively fast and still provides awesome results. My encoding speed is always set to “slow” or “superslow” (not much difference for my setup). I usually set the quality by making use of the preview function in handbrake, which transcodes just a short section of the video which I use for pixel peeping and checking for any major artifacts that would ruin the content. The resulting file also provides an estimate for how large the final transcoded file will be. If you’re happy with the quality setting, you can opt to mess with the encoder tuning. There are different presets for film, animated content and such. I usually do use film tuning if transcoding live-action media.
All this generally leaves me with pretty compact file sizes for 1080p media. And transcoding usually happens at a rate of 60-75 fps depending on the resolution. Going up from “slow” to “medium” improves fps by about 25% and increases file size by about 10%. The ideal balance is up to you.
Advanced tips: try using VMAF (objective video quality analysis algorithm developed by Netflix) to score and compare your different encoding settings. VMAF is neatly integrated into FFMetrics, which is a GUI for FFMpeg and a couple of video analysis algorithms. I also use MPV (open source media player) with FFMpeg command line arguments for playing videos synchronized in a 2x1 or 2x2 matrix. This helps compare the results for quality.
I don’t have anything that can play 4k h264 aside from my phone.
My Rpi4 plays 4k h265 beautifully, so I like h265. Space efficient is just a bonus.
mpv & ffmpeg have been my go to’s for a decade or so…but mpv on the Rpi4 can’t yet manage 4k 2160p afaik, so Kodi it is at the moment.
I investigated AV1 for a bit, which frankly does seem like the future because it can encode to significantly smaller file size vs. 264 and 265. I don’t have a hardware encoder for it (though they exist in the new Intel GPUs), and software encodes are relatively slow even on capable hardware (e.g. Ryzen 7000).
But it’s not worth it at all. The detriments of lossy to lossy + the sheer cost of time (and electricity) to make the change are not worth it. 2TB SSDs are cheaper than 1TB was a year ago, and 8TB mechanical drives for slow storage are even cheaper still. And it isn’t showing any signs of getting more expensive, nor should it.
Intel 7th gen & higher CPUs have Quicksync that does hardware h265 encoding.
You can get an old i5-7500 PC pretty cheap these days. That’s what I have, and tDarr converts about an hour of 1080p h264 content to h265 in roughly 10min.
so any nuc with a number 7 or more would do the job?
As the other person said, NUCs and such are able to do transcodes via Intel QuickSync hardware acceleration, it’s not really possible to transcode 4k in realtime on most CPUs without it.
You will need at least an 8th gen Intel processor to do HVEC which is what h265 uses, more info is in this chart on Wikipedia about which generations support which things. Anecdotally, this has worked extremely well for me for a long time, definitely worth it.
Also be aware if you are doing any virtualization you will need to pass the iGPU through to the guest machine.
7th gen Intel (Kaby Lake) can encode h265, also. Not just 8th gen.
Source: I encode to h265 almost daily using Quicksync on my i5-7500.
Yeah that is true, I had mixed results on the quality of the video using the 7th gen ones so I usually recommend at least 8th gen but that may have improved by now.
Thank you.
I think I will aim for =>8
No problem! I actually am still using 8500k still since it was new for what it’s worth, those things are great no complaints.
If time is not a consideration just batch up transcodes with your shitty hardware and nice/renice the process out of the way.
It seems unreasonable with the hardware, even with nice things.
I run Gentoo, with lots of binaries, on my 2011 iMac just fine but encoding HD video on it feels like abuse.
Sorry, you need hardware.
If you are doing a ton of encoding, you could even get specialized hardware like amd alevo (spelling?) card which enables you to encode even AV1.
That being said, what are you doing that requires you to encode h.265 on ancient hardware?
I’m using a 2011 imac & 2010 macbook pro as my main devices. I have an rpi4 as a little media center & personal server.
2160p x265 looks great on the pi, 2160p x264 is grim. Encoding 2160p on any of my systems is pain.
Ongoing it would be nice to be able to re-encode the occasional 2160p video faster than a tenth of real time or feeling like I’m overly stressing very old hardware.
Think I may keep an eye out for a 2nd hand nuc, I like small & quiet and I didn’t realize until posting this thread that cpu encoding is preferred to gpu. A nuc would also be nice for some better retro game action than the pi4.
It’s hard to beat a GPU in HEVC encoding performance. SoC:s have comparable performance to dGPU:s in that regard. A used zen/zen2 laptop might be a cheap and tiny workhorse for the purpose. I have a zen/vega10 matebook 2020 that does 1080p at around 2.5-3x real-time at high quality presets. No doubt it could do 4k at faster presets.
With the hardware in my arsenal I’ve found that AMD>Intel>nVidia, at least quality wise. VideoToolbox on Mac is down there with nVidia, and Apple silicon being pretty slow at it compared to software x265 on the same machine.
Where have you heard that about Apple Silicon? Not that I’m trying to say it’s better than the others, but it is absolutely better than software encoding on the same machine.
Post in thread ‘Mac Mini M1 H.265 encoding?’ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/mac-mini-m1-h-265-encoding.2269815/post-29606894
https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/y0t4z6/hardware_accelerated_video_transcoding_apple/irviw29/
Haven’t heard anything, just from memory of my own testing. Looking back at my notes I see a 40-50% speed up with VideoToolbox compared to x265 on M1, but at a lot crappier quality.
I haven’t tested in quite a while, though. I wrote off doing encoding on the M1, as my AMD cards are a lot faster (and produce better results).
If you want real time transcoding, then a hardware encoder would be best. Intel CPUs have had hardware H.265 encode support for the last 8 years. Intel ARC GPUs have a very good video encoder, but they require system that supports resizable BAR.
If you just want to transcode a large number of videos for storage, get a system with loads of CPU cores and run multiple transcodes in parallel. Software encoders produce higher quality video than hardware encoders.
There are cloud GPUs, but that gets very expensive, very fast. You are much better off buying your own hardware if you need to use it for a longer period of time.
they require system that supports resizable BAR
I don’t think it’s required anymore, but it’s definitely still recommended.
Thanks
What is resizable BAR?
It improves memory access to the GPU, but I don’t believe it’s required for Intel ARC anymore.
thx
The encoder engine is the same for all ARC GPUs, meaning you can by the lowest end one and it has the same encoding/decoding performance as the top tier one.
An intel nuc with an IGPU from the last few generations would do it no problem (even a pentium or i3 from the last few generations would be better than what you have by the sounds of it).
Or you can grab a cheap used quadro p600 or gt1050 (minimum model with hardware H265 NVENC support) and use that for transcoding or run an app like tdarr, unmanic or fileflows to convert your library to a direct streamable format in the background.
Why are you even requiring transcode is also something to look at, you should be trying to get your playback devices to play the raw files directly, that means a solid network infrastructure and properly configured software. If they are physically incapable of playing your 4k media then you need to look at upgrading them.
This all applies whether you are running plex, jellyfin, emby or whatever else.
Besides new hardware and windows, here is a tool that will you can sink time into. There is a lot of things to lern.
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.
Do you maybe have the command line for it? Looking to do something similar myself.
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.
I put it in a script, so I’ll need to check my server later.
Do we have a remindme bot here?
Not as far as i know, consider this my reminder, I guess? 😅
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 withconvert_to_h265.sh some_video.mkvHere is an explanation for the options I used:
ffmpegis the command
-i "$1"is the input file. In this case, the argument to the script
-vcodec libx265is specifying the plugin to use as libx265
-crf 28is specifying the quality/compression rate. I found this one to be pretty acceptable
-map 0makes it select ALL audio tracks and ALL subtitle tracks
-c:s copycopies subtitle tracks
"${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/nulltells 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_logsIf you want to get fancy, you can even put this in a loop to run on all the files that end in
.mkvin 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 doneAnd if you want to get mega fancy, you can have it run recursively for all files that end in
.mkvin 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 doneIf you do either of the latter two, I would put it in a script. Let’s call the first one
convert_all_to_h265.shand the second oneconvert_all_to_h265_recursively.sh. Call them withconvert_all_to_h265.sh &andconvert_all_to_h265_recursively.sh &if you want to run them in the background.You also might want to play around with the
-crf 28value 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.Dude this is the most thorough explanation of a single command line I’ve ever had!
Thanks for the effort, and the line itself.
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.
Yea can you share more info / process / settings?
Try handbrake maybe https://handbrake.fr Might not be exactly what you want but something to look at while you wait for other answers.
If you are actively making 4k videos through, I think it might be time for you to upgrade.
NUC should be fine. I have unmanic running in a container on it converting anything I add to folders.
Cloud GPUs are a thing, but they’re very expensive.
it depends, they break even if you run them for many hours a day, but for smaller / quicker workloads they can make a lot of sense
I would recommend trying to rent a vps for just long enough to transcode and using that. It would be way cheaper than buying new hardware.
