Is HEVC (8-bit)/AAC a good, modern CODEC combination for rebuilding & reducing my library size without compromising quality? Helpful feedback would be appreciated.
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.
Exactly this, avoid re-encoding at all costs. Giant hard drives are real cheap these days
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Certified refurbished drives. They’re less reliable than new, but a hell of a lot cheaper. I’ve been running my Plex on a 14 TB.
Just beware of the sound levels of some of those drives.
Definitely, unless the original source was very inefficiently compressed, it’s not worth the time, effort and quality loss to save a small amount of space.