Archive your videoclips with Handbrake II
In the first part I already explained what results can be expected when converting video clips with Handbrake.
Initial situation
For archiving my clips, especially those I create for YouTube, I actually only need a conversion of 1440p, 4K and, with the Lumix S5 IIx, the Opengate format from time to time. The trigger was a clip of almost 12 minutes that I accidentally recorded at 400MBit/sec. This then resulted in a file with a size of just over 38GB.
And in addition to these sizes, I only need the distinction between 8-bit and 10-bit material. And getting 10-bit material is essential for me if I want to edit the video again; then I want to have full color grading options.
I recorded a video about this:
Handbrake Presets
Handbrake comes with a lot of presets that are essentially based on the triggering of the target material and/or the target device. In some cases, the presets also differentiate how many frames/second the target material should have.
So we select “none” for resolution scaling. In the video tab there are 3 important settings: For frames/second we select “same as source”, constant bit rate and quality. For quality everyone has to try out for themselves which values are optimal or perhaps acceptable.
Export Presets
We create a new preset from these specifications and of course the selection of an encoder. We should basically use H265 encoding here and of course select hardware support where available.
These presets can then be exported as JSON files.
With such a preset you can call up the command line version of Handbrake and convert your videos. Unfortunately, I had to do this under Windows because with Linux either the hardware support doesn’t work (in my case with the AMD Ryzen) or in any case the support for 10 bit is missing.
The 3 case scenarios
I have now played through 3 cases using a modified script. Firstly a 1440p file, 8 bit with 60 FPS, a 4K file 10 bit in vLOG and finally a file in Opengate (5.9K) also in 10 bit.
1440p 60 fps 5.861.011.026 Bytes 14:22 min
| CPU | Zeit | Watt | Watt/h | Size | KB/sec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ryzen 7 5600 | 5:15 | 67W | 5.58 | 124.667.421 | 352 |
| N100 | 18:38 | 15W | 4.63 | 116.566.192 | 272 |
| RTX 3600 | 4:00 | 260W | 16.00 | 126.236.196 | 363 |
| i7-14700 | 4:05 | 180W | 12.00 | 116.566.192 | 272 |
4K 29.97 fps 400MBit/sec 38.597.580.630 Bytes 12:42 min
| CPU | Zeit | Watt | Watt/h | Size | KB/sec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ryzen 7 5600 | 10:57 | 70W | 12.83 | 527.370.906 | 4.732 |
| N100 | 38:40 | 15W | 9.62 | 437.277.932 | 3.785 |
| RTX 3600 | 4:00 | 310W | 20.66 | 1.959.749.052 | 19.748 |
| i7-14700 | 6:00 | 230W | 23.00 | 437.277.932 | 3.785 |
Opengate 29.97 fps 5.721.256.171 Bytes 3:52min
| CPU | Zeit | Watt | Watt/h | Size | KB/sec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ryzen 7 5600 | 21:54 | 81W | 29.70 | 511.108.498 (x265) | 16.740 |
| N100 | 1:34:05 | 15W | 23.5 | 431.266.836 | 13.998 |
| RTX 3600 | 5:00 | 300W | 25.00 | 1.420.547.830 | 47.965 |
| i7-14700 | 5:00 | 250W | 20.83 | 431.266.836 | 13.998 |
It is noteworthy that the Intel QSV support still works even with the small N100 CPU and Opengate, while here the built-in GPU of the AMD Ryen 7 5700G fails with an error and you can only transcode via the CPU.
Results and outlook
Based on these results, the conversion with the NVidia graphics card is considered to be quite ineffective in terms of both power consumption and file size.
Therefore, a large collection of video clips would be converted with the N100. This uses the least power and still results in relatively small files. And with a large number of video clips, you can simply let the small PC run for a few days.
What I’m still missing is the option in the script to use ffmpeg or mediainfo to determine both the resolution and the color depth in order to automatically determine which preset is used.
Conclusion
Handbrake is a very powerful tool for reducing the size of your video archive without affecting the quality. It would be desirable if 10-bit support was also available in Linux.
ciao tuxoche
