Some more graphs about Friends blu-ray transcodes

djs

• 2 min read

If you didn't have enough from my previous post about this, here's more! I finished transcoding them again! This time using the --small preset in transcode-video. The file sizes are almost halved and honestly the quality isn't noticably worse.

You'd think it would be, since I essentially sliced the bitrate in half, but nope. I can watch these just fine without complaining about the quality. The show is so god damn grainy anyway that it kind of looks bad to begin with.

Some thoughts:

  • The --quick option drastically increased speed (as you can see in the graphs), and the file sizes didn't get much bigger for some reason. Don told me that there might be some quality loss though so I stopped using it pretty fast. I kept the episodes I did with it though just as a memento.
  • I thought I could hear the difference between AC3 384kbps and AC3 640kbps but nope. I can't. The reason I thought I did was because volume normalization, it made the sound crack in some areas, but turning down the volume just a bit helped a lot.
  • The space I save by doing this is quite nice, roughly 120 GB. While it might not sound like much in an age of 4 TB HDDs, it adds up. 120 GB is roughly 12 blu-ray movies or 2 DVD-quality TV shows.
  • transcode-video is faster in Windows than in OS X. In OS X I got roughly ~31 fps, while in Windows it would be around ~25 fps. Not sure why, it's the exact same computer.
  • I tried using some degrain filters but I ended up not using them. While they looked fine in screenshot comparions and watching them on my computer, something looked very weird with them when I watched them on my TV.

Anyway, here's the graphs. I actually included the data from my previous transcodes/the default option, so you can compare.

transcode time

As you can see, `--small` is generally faster, especially combined with quick. Around Season 8-9 you can see it was way slower though. This was because of my PC doing other things (7zipping a bunch of stuff.)

transcode fps

bitrate

output file size

Almost half in size most of the time, which made it all worth it.

Now I think I'm done with transcoding Friends episodes for a long time, until I can get a hold of the DVDs and do those too (I want to as they have extended episodes.)