HEVC media optimization

Do you have a large collection of video media files not using HEVC (H265) yet? There is a massive amount of disk space coming your way if you flick over to the new video codec format.

HEVC definitely lives up to its name, for most media you can expect a 70% or more disk savings from transcoding from an old codec. There are some catches though… If you want your TV to play it direct (i.e. straight off the file) the codec will need to be supported by it. You can of course get around this by using a media server such as Plex or Emby which will transcode from HEVC back to a compatible format.

Why would you transcode to HEVC? – again, disk space. HEVC as stated above can reduced you Media footprint significantly. You could boost your quality and save your disk space at the same time by recording at a higher resolution then applying the HEVC codec.

I created a powershell script to transcode my media to HEVC using my AMD graphics card. The advantage of doing this is that transcoding completed by my GPU is significantly faster than my CPU. I do not have the graphics card in my media server, so instead connect via SMB and let my gaming machine run the transcoding from remote…

The powershell script uses ffmpeg to ;

  • transcodes video stream to hevc using AMD h/w encoder
  • copys all existing audio and subtitles (i.e. no conversion)
  • works in batches (to prevent constant scanning of files) – able to set max batch size and processing time before re-scanning disk
  • overwrites source with new HEVC transcode if move_file = 1 (WARNING this is default!)
  • checks to see if video codec is already HEVC (if so, skips)
  • writes transcode.log for successful transcode (duration and space savings)
  • writes skip.log for already hevc and failed transcodes (used to skip in next loop, errors in transcode.log)

Check here for updates and script – https://github.com/dwtaylornz/hevctranscode

Docker – Running Ubiquiti NVR and Plex

downloadBye bye virtual machines and their inherent OS bloat. Docker and containerization is here…

The trick to containerization is picking the right workload (as with most things). Think about data, its state and where it lives and whether there are any benefits to running as a container.

Both Ubiquiti’s NVR and Plex’s media server software run’s some base application, this app within its own container then maps to data (which can exist outside the instance) that is consistent.

The fun continues when you can update a container (updating the running application), but keeping the data intact at another location. This can really help with version control etc where you can sometimes just point the new container at the data and turn off the old instance. Rollback? easy. Turn off new container and roll back to old.

Of course things are easier if you are running applications that do not change the data.  Both NVR and Plex only index and capture new data (in consistant format), which makes moving between application versions much easier.

The nature of containerization means that the full power of the host is taken into regard. This is different to regular visualization where each guest is limited to the virtual hardware it is assigned. There are of course challenges where resource is congested, but this can also happen in the latter (cpu scheduling, under / over allocation of resources).

Availability also has to be built with containers in mind, with load balances and instances across multiple hosts.

Update : this site has now now been migrated from a VM to 2 x docker containers…. One for MySQL Backend and one for WordPress FrontEnd. Containers can be linked – so the WordPress container can access MySQL container via its own local port. Very cool.