From Disc to Drive: A Beginner's Guide to Preparing Your Media for Jellyfin

[Jellyman6969]

What exactly is the point of transcoding? The amount of money spent on power would be better spent on a new HDD, and I assume the majority of streaming happens within the home on LAN, so data transferred shouldn't be a huge issue. If your library is not very large, I could see the point in making your 1-2TB HDD contain your entire library, but I assume people on here have rather large libraries, especially @Perseverant whom made me question the efficiency of it :)

You mention "a single 1080P film can take 1-5 days to transcode on my i5-13600K CPU" and that your typical shavings are around 12GB.
If we assume it takes 2 days to shave off 12GB and you have enough BluRays to have it running 24/7, thats 2190GB saved a year. What is the point exactly? I did the math, or at least tried to.

Your CPU is rated at 125W, boosts go even higher. An 18TB HDD uses about 5W, so to cancel it out and be a bit generous, lets go with 115W difference per year. I suck at power calculations, so I used this site: https://www.rapidtables.com/calc/electri...lator.html
Other Country, Desktop Computer, 115W Power Consumption, 24 hours a day and a cost of 40 cents per kWh (thats a bit less than what I pay for power). That would result in $400 per year in power for transcoding your media, which coincidentally is also what a brand new 18TB HDD costs where I live. So in my case, 2.2TB would be saved and lots of time would be spent, when I could have an 18TB drive with about 16TB usable space for the same cost.

If I look up kWh prices here: https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data..._table.htm I can see the U.S. typically pays 15-20 cents per kWh. With that adjustment, my point is still valid. A 18TB HDD could be bought after ~3 years and the transcoding would only have saved less than 7TB.

[TheDreadPirate]

There are two reasons for pre-transcoding your media, saving disk space and saving bandwidth. Or both.

For those of us with limited uploading bandwidth (40Mbps for me) an uncompressed 1080P bluray pretty much saturates that and 4K blurays greatly exceed it. Thus requiring real time transcoding to lower the bit rate. And that doesn't take into consideration other services I run that also require some, but not a lot, of bandwidth.

As for the power requirements, if you're using a GPU to pre-transcode the power commitment is MUCH MUCH MUCH lower and transcodes A LOT faster. Minutes vs hours or days. An Intel Arc GPU in my case. But Intel iGPUs can be used with almost the same results. Using the iGPU is also a lot faster and a lot more efficient.

An additional benefit of pre-transcoding is the option to use a much slower, higher quality per bit, preset and other custom options to increase codec efficiency. Speaking of efficiency, pre-transcoding allows for using more efficient codecs like AV1.