Noob intro with 1 FQA

[Allmightyballs]

Hey All, Found this forum very helpful as it always came up with every question I googled. Sadly I still don't have any simple answer to my main question. Ive searched so much I think Ive made a complete circle and ended up just confusing myself.

Heres my intro & some background on my situation. I have 3 computers, HP Pavilion 23 all in 1(mainly for my elder aunt who just plays simple games), An Alienware Gaming laptop from before Dell Bought them which I game, social & do business on, & a new Walmart PC which is a Cyberpower with intels I7 8th Gen CPU that Ive barely touched. I also use 3 raspberry pies a lot though I haven't settled on any set OS or use but 1. Currently I have 1 pie running OSMC that's been going for almost a year that I load my movies and shows on a flash drive, mainly to see what I could save on the electric bill(My direct TV box was pulling the same amount as my refrigerator). It does the trick but Id like to explore more options with it.

Between my aunt, dad, girlfriend and myself we have a DVD room that easily beats the guys movie room from Hot Fuzz! We need the space badly and also Im tired of being the "d*ck friend" who never lets anyone barrow anything mainly because I never get them back. I purchased some 4TB Hard drives started ripping all CD's with music and a few movies. 28k songs later, I started on the movies that we don't really watch/care to much about because I was unsure what the best settings would be using handbrake. That's when the Pavillions HD crashed out and I replaced the 500g that failed to a 1T. Now All is up and running again. I also forgot to mention I scanned the entire family's photo albums which brought up the topic of going complete digital.

So with easily over 1k DVDs of various things, some are music videos like Dave Mathews and Incubus live, a lot of cartoons from Looney toons to Futurama & family guy, action movies from new & old 007 to old john wayne movies and foreign films that use subtitles. With that said it brings me to my main question..

When I use DVD decrypter and then put it into handbrake to shrink it, what settings should I use to get the best possibly quality visual & audio, shrink file size the most without loosing to much? I know music dvds & comedy specials will most likely have different settings then say action movies like Xmen but Im lost when it comes to the animation & old cartoons/ movies like Despicable Me or Final Fantasy.

Primary means of watching right now will be using a Raspberry Pie, Roku(streaming from PCs, The PC's themselves and hopefully sooner then later moving to a full NAS set up.
Any handbrake settings advice would be most appreciated especially for the different types of dvds(Music, Comedy specials, Animation, Action). Also if theres a better process or program Im all ears.

Huge Thanks in advance to any who will be so kind to help out as I know this topics covered more then a house with 5 coats of paint

[lingyi]

My $0.02 is everyone chips in $25 and buy a new 4TB external drive or even better $40 and get a 8TB external drive as you can afford them*, then start with backing up the action/high motion movies (which compress poorly without artifacts) and continue on. To rip 1000+ movies will take months and to compress them with Handbrake will add months more time that you could spend actually watching your videos since there's no one magic setting for various types of videos.

Also, whether you keep your rips as they are or shrink them, be sure to have at least one hard drive with a backup of everything you have. I recently brain farted and nuked 6TB of videos. Took less than a day to get them back on a new hard drive because I had a backup.

*Look up my previous posts about why I think external hard drives are the hot buy right now and should not be kept or used in the case they came in. In a nutshell, cheap USB interfaces and power supplies prone to failure.

BTW: I'm assuming you meant FAQ in your title. You can ask a mod to fix it for you or even better have them suggest a better title so you'll get more answers. As it stands, at least to me it makes no sense.

Also, it's Pi not pie.

[KarMa]

Simply put for DVD encoding with x264, I would use CRF 18, preset slow or very slow. But of more concern is the fact that DVD is just about always interlaced one way or another, and so if you don't know what you are doing and want to encode these videos in bulk. Then I would just encode with x264 in interlaced mode. This can be achieved with the x264 command --tff, which stands for top field first. You might have to manually put that command in Handbrake. This way you won't get frame blending from improper deinterlacing/detelecine, but you all always need to have your player deinterlace your content every time you play it back.

As with anything in video processing it always depends, but this should cover most movies. There are ways of restoring the frame rate to it's original rate but I don't find Handbrake great for that job and requires a lot more understanding of the subject and avisynth.

I recently brain farted and nuked 6TB of videos. Took less than a day to get them back on a new hard drive because I had a backup.

If you are on Windows, did you accidentally delete a group of files larger than the Recycling bin would allow and then accidentally clicked/entered "Yes" when asked to permanently delete those files? I did that to 100GB once. Now everytime I install a HDD, I make sure to allow the entire drives contents to fit in the Recycling Bin.

[jagabo]

DVD rips: mod4 cropping, x264, slow preset, RF 18, detelecine film sources (constant frame rate, 23.976 fps), aac audio, mp4 container. If you don't need maximum compatibility keep the original AC3 audio and use an mkv container.

[Allmightyballs]

Thanks Lingyi, Thanks for your 2 cents. I agree with you for the most part but we have to clear the room I keep them all in and having a device I can remote access everything on would be extremely helpful. I'm looking at it all as more of an investment, kind of like how people had VHS's that then turned around a bought dvd's or digital downloads. I do plan to up my storage game, I'm hoping to grab a 60TB Seagate when they are released(long story but I got extremely lucky), if not my plan was to take the 4TB's I have and any extras I get down the road & put in the tower PC as it has a lot of extra slots.

I do currently have a back up plan for everything so everything is duplicated* knock on wood* as I had about 270 some gigs of movies disappear somehow. You'll have to forgive my typo's, I tend to get a bit dyslexic(no offence to anyone) when I fast type for extended periods(also posting on reddit for suggestions). I'm one of those guys where the slightest detail may make or break things while still trying to keep it bearable to read & understand. I also try to take 1 thing at a time and my head is still kind of full with info on lossless audio rips from all the CD's I finally finished. I know it will take forever with the amount of movies I have but I figured start with the ones we watch the least so they can go into a storage container, also I've noticed a bit of data rot on a couple so I'm hoping to save them before they become useless.

I'm still fairly new to the entire process but I've hit a point where I feel I should take more care & caution so I don't have to repeat things later. I just took a clip from a Resident Evil animated movie about a minute long and tested about 10 different recommended settings to see how the quality turned out for every planned use. Up until recently I was under the impression everything had to be shrunken down but I'm now seeing that applies more to youtubers & video uploads & only a preference for space savers when it comes to DVD's.

Right now I'm keeping everything MP4 but a lot of people are telling me to use MKV & 265 instead of x264.. Then different settings for PAR movies & 192 instead of 160 audio.. I think this is where a bulk of the confusion has come from. I know I'm going a bit overboard but I've got the time & space so I figured why not if it makes life easier. I'm literally under doctors orders to play video games for a year minimum due to my accident. Plus I saw a video from a reddit post of 1 guy who did something similar but used plex and now he's got all his movies, music, photos, even PDF recipes that he can access remotely and imagined.. maybe a bit to much.

Jagabo- Is that for everything in general or would that exclude anything? Right now I'm reading up on movies that have 25 frame rate vs 30 and appropriate settings for each, pro's and cons of each settings ect.

My current understanding is, there is a nice general setting for almost everything but it boils down to how much space you want to save/have, except for fuzz & grain when it comes to cartoons and animated movies and 25 vs 30 fps movies

[lingyi]

I recently brain farted and nuked 6TB of videos. Took less than a day to get them back on a new hard drive because I had a backup.

If you are on Windows, did you accidentally delete a group of files larger than the Recycling bin would allow and then accidentally clicked/entered "Yes" when asked to permanently delete those files? I did that to 100GB once. Now everytime I install a HDD, I make sure to allow the entire drives contents to fit in the Recycling Bin.

No, full details are in this thread: https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/391000-A-tale-of-the-importance-of-backups, but in a nutshell, I was resizing an old partition and creating a new one on a 8TB drive. Didn't properly shut down the partitioning program, rebooted and everything was gone. Quicker and easier to restore the backup rather than try data recovery.

[KarMa]

No, full details are in this thread: https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/391000-A-tale-of-the-importance-of-backups, but in a nutshell, I was resizing an old partition and creating a new one on a 8TB drive. Didn't properly shut down the partitioning program, rebooted and everything was gone. Quicker and easier to restore the backup rather than try data recovery.

Oh that's right, I even commented in that thread

Right now I'm keeping everything MP4 but a lot of people are telling me to use MKV & 265 instead of x264..

x265 doesn't really have much of an advantage with SD material.

[lingyi]

Thanks Lingyi, Thanks for your 2 cents. I agree with you for the most part but we have to clear the room I keep them all in and having a device I can remote access everything on would be extremely helpful. I'm looking at it all as more of an investment, kind of like how people had VHS's that then turned around a bought dvd's or digital downloads. I do plan to up my storage game, I'm hoping to grab a 60TB Seagate when they are released(long story but I got extremely lucky), if not my plan was to take the 4TB's I have and any extras I get down the road & put in the tower PC as it has a lot of extra slots.

If you run out of bay space, the three 3 1/2 HDDs in two 5 1/4 bay cages are nice, especially if you want to swap out drives. When I built my new PC this year, I planned to have 11 HDDs + 1 SSD for the OS, but since I leave my PC on 24/7 and don't need access to all the drives at once, I changed to 4 bay external enclosures. Wish you luck on getting that 60TB SSD. Just make sure to have everything backed up!

[amaipaipai]

Another thing to be concern about Handbreak, if you use a film source (23.976 fps) it encode as a 30 fps file, so you have to manually adjust it if you know what you are doing, otherwise, if you get something in the middle your are screwed with this auto do everything programs. About MKV and x264/x265.

MKV, MP4, MOV, AVI, RM are containers, it's a digital "box" that holds the video stuff, one container has more features than others and that's it. H265 was designed to be a efficient video encoding by utilizing about half of the bitrate H264 would use, in other words, you can save some space with your videos using less bitrate, however depending how much bitrate you use the quality it's the same. To my understanding, H265 for DVD's it's overkill, plus, not every hardware in the market can decode H265's.

You can read more about it here:
http://wp.xin.at/archives/3465

[jagabo]

Jagabo- Is that for everything in general or would that exclude anything?

That covers a majority of NTSC DVDs. Many of the rest will require advanced knowledge and a tool like AviSynth for the best results.

Right now I'm reading up on movies that have 25 frame rate vs 30 and appropriate settings for each, pro's and cons of each settings ect.

NTSC DVDs are encoded at 30 fps but the underlying movies and TV shows are almost always shot on film at 24 fps. They use a process called 3:2 pulldown to convert from 24 fps to 30 fps (really 60 fields per second):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecine#2:3_pulldown

If you convert to progressive 30 fps you will have a duplicate frame every 5th frame leading to six jerks every second at playback. So you want to restore the original 24 fps film frames: inverse telecine, or "detelecine" and frame rate reduction in Handbrake.

In PAL countries film is usually sped up to 25 fps, reducing the running time by about 4 percent. If you don't mind that you can leave such videos at 25 fps. Some people prefer to slow them to 24 fps but the audio has to be slowed down too. Handbrake can't handle this.

The Raspberry Pi (I use one with KODI on one TV) doesn't include a hardware h.265 (HEVC) decoder so it has to fall back on software decoding. It can usually handle standard definition h.265 but it's too slow for HD material. Inexpensive (~US$50) set-top players can handle HD h.265 decoding but their firmware is often limited and full of bugs. For example, many of the "Android TV" devices aren't really Android TV -- they are smartphone or tablet versions of Android stuffed in a box to play videos. They often don't work well because they expect a touch screen for navigation!

h.265's goal was to encode video with the same quality at half the bitrate of h.264. But for SD material it doesn't really reach that goal. And to the extent it does, it is achieved by removing a lot of grain and fine details. The loss of grain leads to posterization artifacts in shallow gradients. You can force the encoders to retain more grain to prevent that but then the advantage over h.264 is even further decreased. And it takes much longer to encode and fewer devices can display it.