Is HEVC (8-bit)/AAC a good, modern CODEC combination for rebuilding & reducing my library size without compromising quality? Helpful feedback would be appreciated.
If you’re concerned about quality, re-encoding from a lossy format to another lossy format is always going to lose more quality. Even if the format you choose would have been better quality if it was encoded directly from the source, the result is almost certainly going to look worse than what you have now.
A lot of processing power to use (re-encoding and transcoding for certain streaming clients) when, like others say, it might just be easier to not bother
I agree and have found that out. HEVC is a hog when it comes to processing. But, the reason I’m re-encoding is because my system crashed or should I say someone crashed it for me (long story) and I need to rebuild a large part of my library and just want everything consistent.
It’s crazy. Why does the libx265 take SO much processing power to just convert ONE file at a time. I mean it pushes my CPU to >80% and if I try 2 files it’s 100% and stays there. And, the hevc_amf encoder won’t create 10-bit HEVC through the GUI I use. I’m just about ready to encode from the original sources again to h.264 and forget it.
I am sure I am in the minority, but avoid AAC multi channel encodes as much as possible. It really makes no sense for anyone. Most home theater equipment does not support it. AC3 or eAC3 are supported by nearly every device natively. AAC does not work over SPDIF or HDMI ARC without reencoding. All that for a slightly lower bitrate? No thanks. Plus most are likely encoded from a AC3 or eAC3 so they will sound worse than the native version.