4K Too Big

[MusicMan]

Hi there,

As we know who have bought any computer equipment lately, SSD prices went through the roof, which led to more people buying mechanical hard drives. So, now they've gone up 50% in the last few months. I want to minimize the costs for backing up my media library. I've pulled every hard drive I had saved through the years. So glad I'm a hoarder now. lol. I have a box of "obsolete" hard drives. Anyway, most are 250gb to 1TB, so not a lot of space. 4k discs take up usually around 100GB or so to backup. Other than downsizing the resolution of the MKV files manually using Handbrake to 1080 or 720, is there any way to "shrink" the disc "iso" like DVD Shrink used to do with DVDs back in the days? It just shrunk everything down but maintained all the menus and stuff, just fitting on a smaller disc?

[MartyMcNuts]

Hi there,

As we know who have bought any computer equipment lately, SSD prices went through the roof, which led to more people buying mechanical hard drives. So, now they've gone up 50% in the last few months. I want to minimize the costs for backing up my media library. I've pulled every hard drive I had saved through the years. So glad I'm a hoarder now. lol. I have a box of "obsolete" hard drives. Anyway, most are 250gb to 1TB, so not a lot of space. 4k discs take up usually around 100GB or so to backup. Other than downsizing the resolution of the MKV files manually using Handbrake to 1080 or 720, is there any way to "shrink" the disc "iso" like DVD Shrink used to do with DVDs back in the days? It just shrunk everything down but maintained all the menus and stuff, just fitting on a smaller disc?

A bit pointless downsizing the resolution. May as well just rip the blu-ray disc! A slightly better option would be to re-encode the 4K video to around half of the bitrate. This way you still keep the 4K res and it'll still look pretty good on a large TV.

Personally, I re-encode all of my UHD video at a bitrate of 25000 which is often a bit over 50% bitrate reduction and don't notice any difference on my 75" TV when sitting at approx 3m away. I keep the audio untouched as ATMOS audio is great!

[MusicMan]

Hi there,

As we know who have bought any computer equipment lately, SSD prices went through the roof, which led to more people buying mechanical hard drives. So, now they've gone up 50% in the last few months. I want to minimize the costs for backing up my media library. I've pulled every hard drive I had saved through the years. So glad I'm a hoarder now. lol. I have a box of "obsolete" hard drives. Anyway, most are 250gb to 1TB, so not a lot of space. 4k discs take up usually around 100GB or so to backup. Other than downsizing the resolution of the MKV files manually using Handbrake to 1080 or 720, is there any way to "shrink" the disc "iso" like DVD Shrink used to do with DVDs back in the days? It just shrunk everything down but maintained all the menus and stuff, just fitting on a smaller disc?

A bit pointless downsizing the resolution. May as well just rip the blu-ray disc! A slightly better option would be to re-encode the 4K video to around half of the bitrate. This way you still keep the 4K res and it'll still look pretty good on a large TV.

Personally, I re-encode all of my UHD video at a bitrate of 25000 which is often a bit over 50% bitrate reduction and don't notice any difference on my 75" TV when sitting at approx 3m away. I keep the audio untouched as ATMOS audio is great!

Some are 4K only discs. The ones that include non-4k Blurays, I will definitely image the bluray version of the film. I would prefer to have a 1080 version of a backup than no backup at all. 4k discs are just too big and I have too many movies, TV shows, and documentaries to justify taking up 100GB for one film. I don't even buy 4K anymore. Upscaled Blurays look good enough for me.

[MartyMcNuts]

Hi there,

As we know who have bought any computer equipment lately, SSD prices went through the roof, which led to more people buying mechanical hard drives. So, now they've gone up 50% in the last few months. I want to minimize the costs for backing up my media library. I've pulled every hard drive I had saved through the years. So glad I'm a hoarder now. lol. I have a box of "obsolete" hard drives. Anyway, most are 250gb to 1TB, so not a lot of space. 4k discs take up usually around 100GB or so to backup. Other than downsizing the resolution of the MKV files manually using Handbrake to 1080 or 720, is there any way to "shrink" the disc "iso" like DVD Shrink used to do with DVDs back in the days? It just shrunk everything down but maintained all the menus and stuff, just fitting on a smaller disc?

A bit pointless downsizing the resolution. May as well just rip the blu-ray disc! A slightly better option would be to re-encode the 4K video to around half of the bitrate. This way you still keep the 4K res and it'll still look pretty good on a large TV.

Personally, I re-encode all of my UHD video at a bitrate of 25000 which is often a bit over 50% bitrate reduction and don't notice any difference on my 75" TV when sitting at approx 3m away. I keep the audio untouched as ATMOS audio is great!

Some are 4K only discs. The ones that include non-4k Blurays, I will definitely image the bluray version of the film. I would prefer to have a 1080 version of a backup than no backup at all. 4k discs are just too big and I have too many movies, TV shows, and documentaries to justify taking up 100GB for one film. I don't even buy 4K anymore. Upscaled Blurays look good enough for me.

Yeah, well you could go either way. Re-encode at 1080p resolution retaining a reasonably high video bitrate bringing the file size down to that of a regular 1080p blu-ray or re-encode at 4K resolution with a lower bitrate still bringing the file size down to approx a 1080p (or a little bit larger) blu-ray.

As I said, when I re-encode 4K at 25k bitrate, most of the time, the video file size ends up around 20-25GB, so my MKV movie file ends up being around 30GB when the audio has been added back in. This way, I stil get a better resolution video while also retaining HDR.

[MusicMan]

A bit pointless downsizing the resolution. May as well just rip the blu-ray disc! A slightly better option would be to re-encode the 4K video to around half of the bitrate. This way you still keep the 4K res and it'll still look pretty good on a large TV.

Personally, I re-encode all of my UHD video at a bitrate of 25000 which is often a bit over 50% bitrate reduction and don't notice any difference on my 75" TV when sitting at approx 3m away. I keep the audio untouched as ATMOS audio is great!

Some are 4K only discs. The ones that include non-4k Blurays, I will definitely image the bluray version of the film. I would prefer to have a 1080 version of a backup than no backup at all. 4k discs are just too big and I have too many movies, TV shows, and documentaries to justify taking up 100GB for one film. I don't even buy 4K anymore. Upscaled Blurays look good enough for me.

Yeah, well you could go either way. Re-encode at 1080p resolution retaining a reasonably high video bitrate bringing the file size down to that of a regular 1080p blu-ray or re-encode at 4K resolution with a lower bitrate still bringing the file size down to approx a 1080p (or a little bit larger) blu-ray.

As I said, when I re-encode 4K at 25k bitrate, most of the time, the video file size ends up around 20-25GB, so my MKV movie file ends up being around 30GB when the audio has been added back in. This way, I stil get a better resolution video while also retaining HDR.

Do you use Handbrake to re-encode them?

[MartyMcNuts]

Some are 4K only discs. The ones that include non-4k Blurays, I will definitely image the bluray version of the film. I would prefer to have a 1080 version of a backup than no backup at all. 4k discs are just too big and I have too many movies, TV shows, and documentaries to justify taking up 100GB for one film. I don't even buy 4K anymore. Upscaled Blurays look good enough for me.

Yeah, well you could go either way. Re-encode at 1080p resolution retaining a reasonably high video bitrate bringing the file size down to that of a regular 1080p blu-ray or re-encode at 4K resolution with a lower bitrate still bringing the file size down to approx a 1080p (or a little bit larger) blu-ray.

As I said, when I re-encode 4K at 25k bitrate, most of the time, the video file size ends up around 20-25GB, so my MKV movie file ends up being around 30GB when the audio has been added back in. This way, I stil get a better resolution video while also retaining HDR.

Do you use Handbrake to re-encode them?

Nope. I hate Handrake. I use Rigaya's nvencc64 CLI so I can use my RTX 4070 to encode (usually takes around 30-45 minutes) as HEVC/H265 software encoding takes hours.

[MusicMan]

Yeah, well you could go either way. Re-encode at 1080p resolution retaining a reasonably high video bitrate bringing the file size down to that of a regular 1080p blu-ray or re-encode at 4K resolution with a lower bitrate still bringing the file size down to approx a 1080p (or a little bit larger) blu-ray.

As I said, when I re-encode 4K at 25k bitrate, most of the time, the video file size ends up around 20-25GB, so my MKV movie file ends up being around 30GB when the audio has been added back in. This way, I stil get a better resolution video while also retaining HDR.

Do you use Handbrake to re-encode them?

Nope. I hate Handrake. I use Rigaya's nvencc64 CLI so I can use my RTX 4070 to encode (usually takes around 30-45 minutes) as HEVC/H265 software encoding takes hours.

So, it uses your video card's processor to encode the video? I have a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060, which has 12GB of dedicated GPU memory. Do you know if that's good enough?

So that I download the right thing, can you point me on where to get this software and how to use it?

I'm curious as I don't like Handbrake either. lol.

[MartyMcNuts]

Do you use Handbrake to re-encode them?

Nope. I hate Handrake. I use Rigaya's nvencc64 CLI so I can use my RTX 4070 to encode (usually takes around 30-45 minutes) as HEVC/H265 software encoding takes hours.

So, it uses your video card's processor to encode the video? I have a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060, which has 12GB of dedicated GPU memory. Do you know if that's good enough?

So that I download the right thing, can you point me on where to get this software and how to use it?

I'm curious as I don't like Handbrake either. lol.

Sure: https://github.com/rigaya/NVEnc/releases

Yea, your RTX 3060 should be fine. I use to use it on an RTX 2070 Super before getting the RTX 4070 Ti Super 16GB.

[dcoke22]

Modern Handbrake can do hardware encoding on AMD VCN, Apple VideoToolbox, Intel Quick Sync Video, Nvidia NVENC, and Media Foundation on Qualcomm ARM processors if you have a Window machine with one of those.

If you don't like Handbrake, then obviously you don't have to use it. But if you want to go down the hardware encoder route, Handbrake can support most hardware one might have.

Before AI compute demand destroyed the world it wasn't uncommon for folks to buy some old Dell business PC for super cheap on eBay and either use Intel Quick Sync Video from the built in GPU for hardware encoding or jam some older low end GPU in there for it and create a dedicated encoding machine. For Nvidia a GTX 1650 Super or newer will do a decent job doing 10-bit h.265 encodes.

[MartyMcNuts]

Modern Handbrake can do hardware encoding on AMD VCN, Apple VideoToolbox, Intel Quick Sync Video, Nvidia NVENC, and Media Foundation on Qualcomm ARM processors if you have a Window machine with one of those.

If you don't like Handbrake, then obviously you don't have to use it. But if you want to go down the hardware encoder route, Handbrake can support most hardware one might have.

Before AI compute demand destroyed the world it wasn't uncommon for folks to buy some old Dell business PC for super cheap on eBay and either use Intel Quick Sync Video from the built in GPU for hardware encoding or jam some older low end GPU in there for it and create a dedicated encoding machine. For Nvidia a GTX 1650 Super or newer will do a decent job doing 10-bit h.265 encodes.

It wouldn't suprise me at all. I'd say it has been 8+ years since I last looked at Handbrake. Back then, it couldn't even keep HDR.