Question Any advice for people with low hard drive capacity?

[LittleJ]

Personally, I use software I purchased to reduce some vids to save space by converting them using a 4:4:4 high profile (removes unnecesarry pixels) at a variable bit rate. However, that takes a lot of time & PC usage so I tend to just convert/downsize 4K vids by manipulating the kbps and/or fr/sec. Besides, 4K is overkill and is just too big so I reduce them to 1080p and save a ton of space. The video quality loss is there but not enough to make it look bad at all.
I recently reduced 75GB of 4K to about 35GB using the following method:
4K video at 60fr/sec @ 30,000kbps
reduced to
1080p at 30fr/sec @ 6000kbps.
Also, I sometimes will take a 12,000kbps 1080p and downsize it to 5000 at the same bitrate to save space with no discernible quality loss.
On average, those methods cut the file size in half and the video is still sharp.....just not 4K sharp. Just remember to check the video for pixelation BEFORE deleting the original file.
Ultimately, if you plan on collecting, save money for ext. HD space. Oh, and word to the wise:
Don't go cheap. Bite the bullet, get the 10TB+ (I always use seegate) and thank me later.
BTW, only ever had 1 seegate crash and that's because I dropped it. Actually, it still works....sort of, kind of.

For the external drives do you try to go for SSDs or HDDs?

 

[brokensaph]

For the external drives do you try to go for SSDs or HDDs?

For downloading/storage/usage purposes, I stick with HDDs exclusively from seegate (my oldest, perfectly functional & well-used 6TB ext.HD is over 5 years old.) I don't go with SSDs for the following reasons:
1. SSDs are weak in constant reads/writes, especially for installing auto-updating programs and other frequent read/write functions.

2. Since the SSDs make use of chips to store data while the chips can only be written for a certain number of times before they fail, there is great chance of SSD failure under too much writing work.

Hope that helps.

 

[Balloonlover1999]

https://github.com/hiancdtrsnm/video-diet

 

[User9876543210x]

Buy an Intel Arc A380, its the cheapest GPU (<$140) that supports hardware accelerated AV1 encoding. Converting to AV1 from HEVC will save you 30% on video files sizes with no decrease in quality, and a lot more if youre willing to slightly sacrifice quality.

Now you may balk at wanting to spend $140 on a GPU that you otherwise dont need (can be used for a media PC or second PC, or installed alongside your normal GPU in your main PC). But think of it as an investment, access to AV1 encoding means youll be able to decrease file sizes by 30% with no loss for years, if your library is 10TB its 3TB* saved today, if its 20TB its 6TB* saved. *Double that if youre running a raid redundancy (which you should be).
It becomes even more valuable if you are running SSD's where price per gig is still a premium.

It will literally pay for itself if you have any sort of big collection. It was cheaper for me, and I effectively gained more space by buying an A380 and converting videos to AV1 than it was upgrading my NAS with more SSDs.

 

[neolith]

Buy an Intel Arc A380, its the cheapest GPU (<$140) that supports hardware accelerated AV1 encoding. Converting to AV1 from HEVC will save you 30% on video files sizes with no decrease in quality, and a lot more if youre willing to slightly sacrifice quality.

Now you may balk at wanting to spend $140 on a GPU that you otherwise dont need (can be used for a media PC or second PC, or installed alongside your normal GPU in your main PC). But think of it as an investment, access to AV1 encoding means youll be able to decrease file sizes by 30% with no loss for years, if your library is 10TB its 3TB* saved today, if its 20TB its 6TB* saved. *Double that if youre running a raid redundancy (which you should be).
It becomes even more valuable if you are running SSD's where price per gig is still a premium.

It will literally pay for itself if you have any sort of big collection. It was cheaper for me, and I effectively gained more space by buying an A380 and converting videos to AV1 than it was upgrading my NAS with more SSDs.

if ios ever gets AV1 support, this is the dream

 

[User9876543210x]

if ios ever gets AV1 support, this is the dream

It will likely get support in the next couple of years, if not with the next gen of iPhones this winter. Qualcomm just adopted it on Snapdragon S8G2, Intel in new GPUs ( also rumored to support it in their IGPs this year), new AMD GPUs, and Nvidia GPUs, on PC, and Mediatek (also Android). Plus the big software companies (Google, Amazon/Twitch, Microsoft, Netflix) are contributing members and slowly pushing it. It's royalty free, and Apple has no reason to be against it, just slow to adopt it.

For my setup I have the A380 GPU in my living room media PC/NAS, I can direct play AV1 from it and my phone, and its able to transcode on the fly back to H.264 for my bedroom TV.

 

[brokensaph]

that’s rough, loosing the 60FPS content and making it 30fps. I get that 4K is overkill for many and even I don’t own a 4K Display but for rare stuff I absolutely always keep the highest quality for archiving purposes. I mean I’m glad pornhub offers 1080p/4K nowadays and I don’t have to download low resolution 360p content anymore like we did in 2006-2010.

since i also collected a lot of (4K) VR scenes (probably 15TB), I just started to delete many of these since I would have to upgrade them to 5k,6k,7k,8K anyways For newer VR headsets like oculus quest 2.

and that makes a big difference when I delete a vr scene being at least 10-20GB each.

And for mainstream content, I always can count on the petabytes of data Usenet has backed up, meaning I can get any mainstream scene in 1080p or 4K as I wish.

my advise to the creator of this thread: Think twice about what is unique content thats hard to get or find again if your hard drive would crash, and what content exists in many places backed up already.
also might use cloud backups, but always have in mind that especially with unencrypted content, mega.nz, GoogleDrive, Dropbox etc can and will delete your account & data at any time.

Here is an example of my latest downscaling effort with no pixelation yet a file size savings of almost 4GB:

https://simpcity.su/threads/mara-blake.33563/post-1929523

If you zoom in, you will find a rougher edge but it is indiscernible in real time.
BTW, I recently found a torrent site that shares exclusively smaller file sizes using H.265 mp4 (as opposed to the standard H.264 found everywhere) which is superior quality and less than half the normal size video file.

 

[neolith]

Here is an example of my latest downscaling effort with no pixelation yet a file size savings of almost 4GB:

https://simpcity.su/threads/mara-blake.33563/post-1929523

If you zoom in, you will find a rougher edge but it is indiscernible in real time.
BTW, I recently found a torrent site that shares exclusively smaller file sizes using H.265 mp4 (as opposed to the standard H.264 found everywhere) which is superior quality and less than half the normal size video file.

using handbrake?