Best way to re-encode my video collection?

Foomy

So I have I couple of Tb of movie/tv rips from dvds I own, but it's eating up a ton of space on my NAS.

Looking for the best way to re-encode them all into h.264, and then preferably have it delete the old files as it goes along, as I don't have enough free space to keep both sets of files at the same time.

And I would like it to be as automated as possible, as I know it's going to take days to process all the files, so if I can just start it, forget about it and look a few days later, that would be awesome.

I looked a little bit at handbrake, but it only seems to be able to load up a single folder of files at once, and won't look into sub-folders, maybe I just didn't look at the right options or something.

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Foomy

If I really had to i could go with something command line based I guess.

But I just remembered I had a spare 500gb drive in my old computer, so i figure I can use that and just do it in a few batches, and just do the final deleting and moving of the files myself.

I was doing some more searching about the topic and ran across WinFF as a decent looking gui front end for ffmpeg, it looks like it should do what I need. But anyone used it before, or have an opinion on how well it works?

Foomy

Wel did some playing around with WinFF and it doesnt seem to do what i need, as it doesnt load folders just a queue of files, and adding them all myself would be a pain. Also i couldnt find a decent endocing profile with it, either got tiny files that looked bad, or ones that were as large as what i started with.

Kharnastus

Delete all those movies and just download/stream them when you need them. The age of having a local music and movie collection is gone. But command line would most likely be your friend for this task. Are these movies and tv shows super rare and not on the internet for viewing at your leisure? Or do you not have a good internet connection?

Foomy

Netflix's selection in Canada blows, we don't get HBO Go, Hulu, Amazon Streaming, or other similar services. So just streaming them isn't an option.

I'm just surprised I haven't found a good solution in my searching yet, I can find things that sort of do the job, but nothing that I can just point at my network drive on the NAS and say "hey, re-encode all that, I'll be back in a week to check"

Kharnastus

I think I failed to include enough winks and nods with the word download. but if we must play by the rules then I think you might be stuck with buying more hard drives.

Foomy

It would just be quicker and much easier to re-encode each folder than to track down any such downloads anyway.

If it really is my only option I can always just add each folder to the handbrake queue, I was just hoping someone knew of a script/program/something that could load up files from a folder and all it's sub folders for encoding.

MrDelish

Did this come up in your search efforts? Looks like it would do what you're wanting.

Foomy

MrDelish wrote: »

Did this come up in your search efforts? Looks like it would do what you're wanting.

that looks to do what I would want only that one is for linux, but it did lead me to a similar script for powershell (I totally forget this existed) that should do the same thing on windows. Just need to do some test runs to see if I can get it the outputs right.

anyone know what a good handbrake preset would be to try first?

baudattitude

This command line will re-encode every MKV file in a folder and all subdirectories - you can just change the mkv to avi or whatever files you want to transcode:

for /R %%a in (*.mkv) do HandbrakeCLI -i "%%a" -o "D:\Encodes\%%~na.m4v" --preset="AppleTV 2"

I use the Apple TV 2 preset because, well, I have a lot of apple stuff. You can pick another preset if you find one that works better.

bhoult

If you want to use linux (ubuntu 14.04 for the example) you can do the following from the base directory of the folder you want to convert. You have to install the libav-tools package first then run:

find -exec avconv -i "{}" -s 480x320 -vcodec mpeg4 -acodec aac -strict -2 -ac 1 -ar 16000 -r 13 -ab 32000 -aspect 3:2 {}.mp4 \; -exec rm {} \;

The above is what I use to encode really small videos suitable for viewing on my android phone. It will delete the source video after conversion so if you don't want to do that then remove the "-exec rm {} \;" from the end.

If you just have windows then you can install ubuntu in a virtual machine (virtualbox) for free, then share a folder with the host machine and put your video in that. May be more than you want to deal with at this point though.