How do you transcode your media for your server??

[Sash]

Hi, 

So I wanted to transcode this upscaled version of Ed, Edd n Eddy. 

The total size of this is over 900 gigs which is a bit crazy for me so that got me into thinking if I can transcode this to 4K HEVC. I used handbrake to encode one of the episodes which compressed the orginal file which was over 6gb to 350mb which is a lot of saved storage. 

What is the absolute best tool or way to transcode media into smaler size while having good picture quality, multi audio tracks, and subs? During my transcode I lost 2 extra audio tracks, subtitles, and the thumbnail of the video file. I must have done something wrong. 

I've also seen there's a dicussion going on between CPU encode being superior compared to GPU encode.

Can anyone share their own experience and put some light onto this topic?

[linuxgaming]

Ffmpeg is definitely your "powerful but sometimes difficult to master" friend for this, the manual is here: https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.html

Ive always found GPU encoding much faster than CPU encoding, but I also find GPU encoding less safe: sometimes weird artifacts make their way into the output which I just never experience with CPU encoding. Ive never investigating the behaviour or its cause except observing one setup when a graphics card which had problems doing DLSS in games (weird purple blocks appeared randomly in the game) also made the worse encodings I've ever seen, with all sorts of green lines and weird randomly appearing fuzzyness in the final output - but this was in some way a *known faulty* GPU.

The speed advantage of GPU encoding (where your GPU supports the requested codec at least) is far quicker than CPU encoding.

Have fun!

[Sash]

Ffmpeg is definitely your "powerful but sometimes difficult to master" friend for this, the manual is here: https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.html

Ive always found GPU encoding much faster than CPU encoding, but I also find GPU encoding less safe: sometimes weird artifacts make their way into the output which I just never experience with CPU encoding. Ive never investigating the behaviour or its cause except observing one setup when a graphics card which had problems doing DLSS in games (weird purple blocks appeared randomly in the game) also made the worse encodings I've ever seen, with all sorts of green lines and weird randomly appearing fuzzyness in the final output - but this was in some way a *known faulty* GPU.

The speed advantage of GPU encoding (where your GPU supports the requested codec at least) is far quicker than CPU encoding.

Have fun!

I have encoded about 20 episodes in 1080p 10bit H265, and 2160p 10bit H265 using my RTX Card. The episodes are about 20-22 mins long and before transcoding each ep was about 1.25gb after transcoding it went under 500mb which is good in my opinion. The CPU encodes takes about 30-45 mins with each ep which is a lot slower than GPU. It took me about 3 mins to encode each episode with GPU.

I tried to read ffmpeg documentation but it seems too complicated to me, and I think handbrake fulfills my requirement.