I’ve amassed a sizeable hoard, nearly all encoded h264 or h265.
The space savings made by AV1 are attractive, but I don’t want to move on it until after I’ve acquired hardware capable of AV1 GPU accelerated decode.
Even then, the cost of reacquiring some works has to be weighed. Storage space gets freed; but how often do I actually revisit some cherished items?
Anybody else having to make similar evaluations?
I plan to keep using my current 2015-ish phone to watch my media at home, so it’s likely I’ll keep off of AV1 until phones are made somehow hardware upgradable (Fairphone?). Plus, in a general sense, in order to reacquire new media in a better codec you have to at least keep the old media around until you have finished verifying the new, otherwise you run the risk of ending up with no good copy.
The difference between H.265 and AV1 at the same bitrate (assuming both files were encoded with a good encoder) usually isn’t huge.
AV1 is great, but the “hype” surrounding it is mostly comparing it to lowish-bitrate H.264 (live) streams.
Totally agree. This reflects my experience encoding with both formats for releases.
At similar bitrate, av1 also performs much much worse on grain and it is slower to encode
A 16Tb manufacturer recertified drive is USD160 which should sort storage (and later get a second for offline backup). I’m actually holding out until I get GPU encode (apparently CPU is somewhat better, but power considerations, maybe next gen). Do wish the scene would get on with switching, though, are we dinosaurs?
As a note, AMD 7000 series GPU for AV1 encode, the encoder is flawed and can only produce factors of 64x16 pixels, as well as a special 1920x1082 ratio. If your have a lot of 1080p content, it will be recorded with two lines of black pixels on the left and right, and then set to crop it out on video playback.
Just something to keep in mind if you go with that series of GPUs.
Thanks for that, worth knowing.
AV1 is really only practical for content that has a high quality source like a bluray release. Most streaming sites aren’t using AV1 yet, so anything from them would have to be transcoded. Transcoding a low bitrate source to another format will cause a loss in quality. It’s not really worth it unless you want really small files to watch on your phone.
AV1 hardware acceleration is becoming fairly common, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the streaming sites start switching to it soon.
I assumed the context here was torrenting rather than streaming, download blu-ray remuxes and encode to your liking.
Streaming sites are the source of the TV torrents until the season is over and the bluray is released.
My Jellyfin server currently downs support decode for modern formats, so I’m actively avoiding them and it’s getting considerably more difficult
there’s also reencoding your plunder using Blender :)
We don’t have plunder, that would imply that we’re stealing.
If we don’t own digital purchases on purchase, as they can remove titles if they want to, then downloading is not owning/stealing. 😛
Maybe I have a different point of view here, but I have actively converted all my TV series to AV1 and will probably to the same to most of my movies.
The space saving is huge, and the quality is identical to my eyes and hardware. True that storage is cheaper than ever, but this is not a reason valid to waste it anyway.
I have only 6TB of storage for my media and the power needed to run additional disks would only be waste on the long run, and so buying new bogger disks would be a waste for stuff I don’t wantch often (more like hoarding than…).
So AV1 is the way. Software encoding is the best quality, I have heard, rather than hardware encoding. As for playback, I have a fire stick with AV1 support that works flawlessly, so.
Edit: I have FV at home, so converting to AV1 during daylight is actually free for me.
Can you estimate % of space saved?
No, because i did it over long time since I encoded only during the day hours and a few episodes at a time.
I can say that I fit a good 30% more episodes in the same space, but at the same time I also have added movies and reduces sizes too, so hard to tell reasonably.
I can say that all my collection was mostly h264 before.
