poop

  • 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I cant say I care as much as I used to, since encoding has gotten quite good, but I have also gotten better at seeing (aka. worse at being distracted by) compression artifacts so while I am less of a perfect remux rip supremacist, I'm also more sensitive to bad encodes so its a double edged sword.

    I still seek out the highest quality versions of things that I personally care about, but I don't seek those out for absolutely everything like I used to. I recently saved 12TB running a slight compression pass on my non-4k movie library, turning (for example) a 30gb 1080p Bluray Remux into a 20gb H265 high bitrate encode, which made more room for more full fat 4K bluray files for things I care about, and the few 1080p full remuxes I want to keep for rarities and things that arent as good from the 4k releases or the ones where the 4k release was drastically different (like the LOTR 4k's having poor dynamic range and the colours being changed for the Matrix etc), which I may encode in the future to save more space again. I know I can compress an 80gb UHD bluray file down to 60gb with zero noticeable loss, thats as far as I need to go, I don't need to go down to 10gigs like some release groups try to do, and at that level of compression you might as well be at 1080p.

    I cant go as low as a low bitrate 720p movie these days as I'm very close to a large screen so they tend to look quite poor, soft edges, banded gradients, motion artifacts, poor sound etc. but if I were on a smaller screen or watching movies on a phone like I used to, I probably wouldn't care as much.

    Another side to my choice to compress is that I have about 10 active Plex clients at the moment and previously they were mostly getting transcoded feeds (mostly from remux sources) but now most of them are getting a better quality encode (slow CPU encode VS fast GPU stream) direct to their screens, so while I've compressed a decent chunk of the library, my clients are getting better quality feeds from it.




  • The shield pro 2019 is probably still the best overall, it's not perfect as there are some weaknesses due to the age of its chipset, but for all the common formats used in Movies and TV it works perfectly, especially if you are playing full remux files, not re-encoded compressed video. Kodi runs very well, Plex runs very well, Jellyfin is mostly perfect too, but has some limitations in the current version.

    Yes it supports HDR10 (not10+) and Dolby Vision, which covers 98% of all 4K blurays and TV shows, anything HDR10+ just gets played in HDR10 compatibility mode, if you TV doesn't do DV it plays the HDR10 layer on 99% of files. There are some issues with HLG as it isnt properly supported but you don't come across that format all that often and there is usually an SDR or regular HDR version available, if your TV supports manually activating HLG then it works fine.

    Yes there is a minor colour bug in some DV content, no it isn't the end of the world as some people make it out to be.

    It is one of the only players that will give you full DTS:X and Dolby Atmos support, it has a very nice configurable upscaler for lower res content (AI upscale on low works excellently with minimal artifacts), it still has a lot going for it despite its age.

    Also its easy to decrapify with ADB, you can easily configure third party launchers and other fun stuff.


  • Aussie here, We're still very much a car centric country, but for major public events we are pretty much hardwired to use public transport. I dont know what the actual parking capacity of the MCG is, but Marvel Stadium (Docklands) is only 500 cars with 55000 seats(not including the many nearby free and paid parking locations), that is much smaller than the MCG at over 100000 capacity, one of the worlds highest capacity stadiums despite our puny population.

    Apart from most stadiums having extensive train, bus and drop-off access, we also have Park and Ride programs that can temporarily scale up to cover events like this which can basically turn any unused land into a large temporary carpark with dedicated bus services that take you either to the venue directly or to the local train station when they both have limited parking.


  • Or you could wait for meteor lake CPUs which will have a HW AV1 encoder too.

    Plex haven't even enabled transcode to H265 so it might not happen, but Jellyfin currently supports H265 encode and is previewing AV1 streaming. Perhaps that will spur Plex on to open up the FFMPEG encoder options a bit more and let us tune it to our needs and capabilities, but given the shift away from the piracy focused home media server they might not be prioritising it much.


  • I mean, we know the absolute limits of computational efficiency thanks to the Landauer limit and the Margolus–Levitin theorem, and from those we know that we are so far from the limits that it is practically unfathomable.

    If they can show some evidence that they can perform useful calculations 100x more efficiently than whatever they chose to compare against (definitely a cherry picked comparison) then I'll give them my attention, but others have made similar claims in the past then turned out to be in extremely specific algorithms that use quantum calculations that are of course slower and less efficient on any traditional computer.




  • The AI upscaling isn't magic, it's just a decent algorithm to get the best out of lower res content. tuned properly and combined with a TV properly configured to not oversharpen everything it looks excellent but is best left at the lowest setting.

    My findings after using a 2019 shield pro since launch (also decrapified via ADB, and running projectivy) is that it is way too aggressive most of the time on the medium and high settings, leading to heavy artifacting and unnatural looking edges. for live action 720p and 1080p it looks fantastic on low and sometimes medium, but often over-sharpened on high depending on the content of the footage on high, for animation it looks down right deepfried meme sharpened sometimes unless you set it to low.

    It cant make new detail where there was none before (it's not anywhere near the same tech used in high end GPUs like DLSS), its just a smarter, more content aware smoothing and sharpening filter, you can turn it on and off and bring up a side-by-side to see how it is processing the content to help you tune it and also to dial in your TVs settings to suit. if you use resolution switching in plex it will not be active by the way, that will force the shield to output 1080p and the TV handles the upscale at that point, so turn that off if you want to use the shields scaler.

    on 1080p high bitrate content (bluray rips) it looks great, again usually on low or medium, high is too much most of the time, it gets very close to a native 4k rip of the same source if the source is a bit softer to start with, like many films with 2k intermediate masters where the advantages of 4k aren't fully utilised. Native 4k (some higher end films, many high budget tv shows, high value youtube channels etc) still look significantly better at true 4k than AI upscaled 1080.

    So set the shield to Ai Low and set your TVs sharpness to zero or very low (mine is on 5 out of 100 for example in its movie preset, every one is different of course), there are calibration and test patterns built into projectivy (great feature!) you can use to tune motion smoothing, colours and contrast in SDR, HDR10 and DV as well as detail test patterns for upscaler and sharpness tuning so use them for the best experience.

    One thing to note about the instructions on the website you linked for decrapifying via ADB, on the latest firmwares 9.1.1 and newer some of those commands will crash the shield, so go through them one by one rather than running the one line all in one, go through each line and if it forces a reboot, wait for it to come back and just go onto the next command. it wont do any damage but you have to skip a couple of lines to get it to work.


  • I have several media libraries so I set up file flows to only perform compression based on a few specific rules. I never used to compress, but 2 years ago I ran out of space and had no money to upgrade disks, so I started compressing, intending for it to be temporary until I could add space. but it became part of my servers automatic setup and it works great.

    TV show episodes between 3 and 5gb that aren't already H265 get compressed with RF21 H265, but files over 5gb get RF22. only files older than 6 weeks get compressed to give people a chance to watch them in original quality. the compression flow also includes making a stereo aac downmix audio track for added compatibility. so anything that is already H265 or low bitrate is left untouched to avoid unnecessary compression.

    Movies get a similar treatment and H264 files under 5gb are ignored, 5-20gb gets RF21 and 20gb plus gets RF22. All of this is done with 10bit H265 as it tends to look a little better. the amount of compression I;m doing is pretty small, a 3gb TV show for example might end up being 2gb or so, and a 30gb movie will usually end up around 12-15gb at most. I could push harder, particularly for movies but I don't see a need as i've saved 13TB so far with this setup.

    If sonarr/radarr download new versions of something (a TV show gets released on bluray for example) it will go back into the loop and get compressed again, but now it will be a higher quality.

    4K shows and movies are always left untouched, they are in a separate library and are only accessible to certain clients.






  • One of my mini PC's is an N95, which is similar to the n100 but with a higher peak power. It's faster than the old legend 2600k and has a decent little igpu for video processing or general desktop use.

    I run a jellyfin test server from it, transcodes high bitrate 4k HDR H265 to 1080p SDR tonemapped H264 at over 200fps, while running my security camera Dashboard with multiple video feeds.

    Their only limitation is they usually only have a single memory slot so keep that in mind.