It’s the end of January and I’ve just finished a project that I thought would kill me.
If I hadn’t mentioned it here before, towards the end of October I discovered a way to convert all of my video files down to a smaller size without losing sound or video quality. Alas, it meant using a lot of Handbrake and running both of my systems to capacity in order to get things done. But let’s back up a bit. For those who don’t know, I’ve been using my PC as a DVR since before DVRs were popularized back in the early 2000’s. I have thousands and thousands of hours of TV and movies that I’ve recorded, let alone back ups of DVDs and Blu Rays I’ve owned through the years. By myself, I could have lived with how they are. However, my father has been streaming these files off my network since the Veteran’s Administration released him from the nursing home in late 2012.
When I say “constantly,” I mean he plays the same damn movie 20 or 30 times because he has dementia and he forgets what he’s seen so he just starts the movie over. Some of these moves are literally 10gb in size and that poses a problem with streaming them as it simply kills the bandwidth of our wireless network. I couldn’t really say, “Hey dad, you need to back off because I can’t get any work done.” Even if he were to understand the problem, he would forget almost instantly and we’d go right back to streaming that same giant file dozens of times until he moved on to something else.
Side note, if anyone suggests watching the James Bond flick ‘A View to the Kill’ any time soon, I’ll probably punch them. Don’t ask. SO don’t ask.
After experimenting with some formats, I came up with a MKV format that I liked. Well, two of them, one of standard definition and one for high definition movies. I could have gone with MP4, which is popular with the MAC crowd, but I stuck with the MKV shell since I’ve been using it for the past couple of years and I trust it to work with the devices I use. The plus here is that the high def is running about half the size of the original without loss of quality while the standard def is a TENTH of the size of the original (on average) without loss of quality. Since most of my collection was in standard def, I was literally able to remove about 8 hard drives from my setup with all the space I’ve saved.
The downside, of course, is that I couldn’t do anything else for the past three months while the two systems were processing files and by “anything else” I mean even YouTube was a problem. Most of you know my setup, I have a main computer for writing and doing my comic book. I have a secondary system that I use for a DVR/Multimedia center, then I have a laptop that shares a monitor with the secondary machine that I actually work on. Even when I paused to rebuild both desktops with top of the line parts, the result has been the same (though it cut the processing time in half for most files), I simply haven’t done anything other than work and this project since the end of October.
Now it’s almost February. I feel like I’ve been in a time capsule or cyrofreeze for three months now. I’m catching up with the world and you’ll get more on that in my next post…
(Eventually.)
Jim