other_video_transcoding VS unmanic

If you want smaller files, I love Don Melton's video transcoding tools. They are easy to set up and give you a nice, high quality video file with very little fussing around.

Don't have a lot to add that others haven't mentioned other than these days it's probably worth it to do 10-bit HEVC encoding. I don't have endless space so I target 4000 kbps average bitrate for the video and it looks preeeeeeety good. Not quite as good as the Blu Ray, but good enough for my eyes. I tend to bring in the 5.1 AAC and a stereo mixdown. I've been using Handbrake, but if you want to batch things or try out another way, I've used Don Melton's other-transcode with success in the past. I only really stopped using it because I'm encoding on a Mac and it was easier to set a few encoder flags in Handbrake than it.

I would step through a few dozen frames individually (many players let you advance a frame at a time using a single keystroke) to determine whether there is a pattern. If you can confirm telecine content that way, I think some type of fieldmatch filter application may help, for example: "fieldmatch=order=auto:combmatch=full,decimate". I believe this is the method employed by Other_Video_Transcode.

As far as tools go, I'm a fan of Don Melton's scripts. https://github.com/donmelton/other_video_transcoding

I am trying to wrap my head around Tdarr's workflow when it comes to transcoding a file. What I am basically wanting to do is something similar to Other Video Transcoding application. I have blurays that I rip using MakeMKV. I then want Tdarr to take the MKV I created in MakeMKV and transcode it using nvenc_hevc or cpu_hevc with 2 audio tracks(AC3 5.1 and AAC stereo) and a subtitle track(s) for english subtitles.

I use a program called other-transcode to transcode my DVDs and Blurays and have a powershell script I currently use and I am trying to write something similar in Python. I have a basic understanding of Python but for the life of me I can't get subprocess to work right. The closest I came was with this and when I run the python program and it calls other-transcode then other-transcode can't find any encoders. Though running it manually or through my powershell script other-transcode works.

Right now almost all my media doesn't transcode. I have made sure it doesn't by grabbing remuxes and using other video transcoding to put them into a format that will play on Roku and Shield. Unfortunately I don't have an extra video card to throw in my server for transcoding.

The next step would be to figure out a bash script like that, work with the dev of Unmanic (https://github.com/Unmanic/unmanic) , or etc to start encoding my library once I know what I want.

I was eyeballing installing unmanic, a ffmpeg queue tool (https://github.com/Unmanic/unmanic) similarto TDarr, but one thing caught me off guard in the setup Dockerfile:

Unmanic

- unmanic : basically a FFmpeg GUI. I just wanted to test it and next thing I know, I passed through multiples tv shows and got down from 8TB to 6.5TB

You may also wish to look into Unmanic for the ongoing maintenance of your media library. I don't currently use it myself. I have been meaning to try it, just haven't got around to doing it.