Video Transcoding VS timeline

I use this project by Don Melton to get a Blu-ray video down to an 8 - 10 GB file size: https://github.com/donmelton/video_transcoding

It uses HandBrake, FFmpeg, MKVToolNix, and MP4v2 with some custom tuned settings and has really good results from my experience.

I have primarily used Plex and pretty much everything you said is accurate for Plex as well. Limited transcoding based on the machine it is running on. As disc has become cheaper, I have pretty much stopped doing batch transcodes, which is great for the most part. But there are definitely negatives when you want to watch something offline, or remotely. Biggest pain point is subtitles though. Since they aren't ripped as text and then sent to a client, they have to be burned in to the video itself and transcoded on the fly. Which means losing out on 'forced' ones if it can't transcode fast enough.

Plex has definitely started to try and commercialize itself more and offer other stuff, when all I want is access to my own media. So I may look into Jellyfin more soon.

As for batch transcode jobs, I had a system that I was able to set up as essentially a black box. Drop a rip into a folder and out the other side comes a smaller one at a reasonable quality. With forced subs burned right into the actual video. Mostly based on https://github.com/donmelton/video_transcoding

I use Don Melton’s tools to transcode videos to mp4 files. His tools makes use of Handbrake but he has it tuned to produce very small video files of very high quality. You are unlikely to notice the difference when watching the videos.

Checkout https://github.com/donmelton/video_transcoding. In my experience produces higher quality and smaller files than handbrake alone.

When I was ripping my disc collection, I used Don Melton’s library. Don originally started the Safari and Webkit project at Apple but after he retired, he spent some significant time trying to create an easy way of compressing video but resting quality. Great collection of tools in my opinion that leverage handbrake for encoding. Good luck!

Check out https://github.com/donmelton/video_transcoding

I've been using Don Melton's Video Transcoding tool for my whole library. I upgraded my NAS to a Synology DS1019+ a few months ago, so now I have the space to store the untranscoded MakeMKV files. I've had issues with playback in my system, so I don't mind manually transcoding.

Check out https://github.com/donmelton/video_transcoding – I use it to turn raw Blu-ray tips from 30+ gigs down to 5-7 with no noticeable loss of quality.

My timeline thing. It gathers all my crap and puts in onto a timeline. It's a more fine-grained version of scrolling to a specific date on my photo stream.

https://github.com/nicbou/timeline

It serves no purpose, but somehow it attracted one contributor.

It's pointless on purpose. It's the thing I work on when I want to forget about work, and build purely for myself.

Google Drive as a first line of defence. It's been solid for a really long time.

I also run hourly rsync backups to my home server, and propagate them to a Hetzner file storage server. This is done by my timeline thing [0]. The timeline thing backs up files from multiple devices, but also geolocation, social media posts, and other data I consider valuable. It's extensible, so I can add new inputs/outputs as needed.

Whatever your backup strategy is, consider the following threats:

- Your files are held hostage by ransomware, and the damage spreads to your backup

- Your house is destroyed by fire

- You lose your 2FA device

- You are locked out of your Google/Apple/Microsoft account

- You are incapacitated, and someone needs to take over

I have 4 of those factors covered. I am working on the last point.

[0] https://github.com/nicbou/timeline

My own timeline thing.

It hosts all of my data plus my personal diary. I update it at least once a day. My photos, backups and geolocation are automatically uploaded to it.

https://github.com/nicbou/timeline

My home server gets a lot of use too. It's mostly my own code, plus Transmission.

https://github.com/nicbou/homeserver

I also have a few lines of code that take my browser's search queries and routes them according to keywords. Browsers do this natively now, but old habits die hard. Every search query goes through it.

I added RSS to my websites, because my timeline thing (https://github.com/nicbou/timeline) uses them to retrieve posts from my websites.

However, I see the death of RSS as the symptom of a larger problem: when platforms get big enough, they restrict access to their data. RSS feeds disappear, but so do other machine-readable endpoints. If it wasn't for GDPR, there would be no way to export that data. GDPR gave us clunky one-time exports, but even those are often incomplete.

The industry has a strong incentive to kill RSS, since the readers can strip the valuable bits (content or data) from the business bits (analytics, monetisation). RSS users are hard to count or monetise.

This is a battle worth fighting, but it's not one you should expect to win.

https://github.com/nicbou/timeline

It regroups my personal data, and displays it on a timeline. Sort of like if Google Photos also included reddit posts, personal journal entries, text messages and other slices of life.

I do it both as a way to back up files and photos, and as a way to keep an enhanced journal.