Video transcoding

[Suff]

Anyone out there played with this?

I've dabbled from time to time but I've never really had a big need. I watch in native DVD/BD format normally and I pay the cost of the media to carry this amount of storage about with me wherever needed. I have never reformatted for, say, mobile phones or tablets.

So I'm now in a situation where I need to transcode 4 series of Game of Thrones. Mrs S likes it and I downloaded the 213gbyte set from seasons1-4 and extras etc. Except they are using a codec not supported by my Netgear box (home), or my Rasberry Pi/Kodi media centre (Brussels).

It works on my PC with VLC media player or the Shark codec pack.

I'm now left with transcoding the whole lot to another codec and to another container (MKV to MP4). When looking for tools I've been quite disappointed. I've finally wound up with XMedia recode, but that is a PITA as I'm having to set the video language, Audio format (5.1 not the default stereo) and embedded subtitles, for every single file.

Also XMedia recode is slow and hogs all 8 cores in my I7 processor and takes about 12 hours to recode one season. I was looking for something to use my stupidly fast graphics cards and do GPU recoding, but the only specific app which does that for me won't do 5.1 sound, only stereo. The subtitles I can live without because I found SubtitleExtractor which strips the subtitles out of MKV files and saves them as a subtitle file.

I've tried Handbrake and it is supposed to support GPU decoding and recoding, it's fast, about twice the frame rate of my XMedia, but It has issues. First is crashes almost every time I try to load a folder and also crashes after 6 minutes of recoding with a "Successfully completed" message.

I'm using the latest handbrake, but a 64 bit version. I've no interest in going 32 bit for something like this.

So if anyone has done any playing with this and has come up with a tool that will let me transcode Digital TV HD broadcast in the same quality, I'd like to know. It seems to me that this is the preserve of massively expensive tools and my need is not that expensive as I can just use XMedia recode and live with the pants performance, killing my processor and frustratingly obtuse user interface.

[Workingman]

Have you tried Freemake ?

I started updating some of my old music collection by downloading vids and ripping the mp3 track. This was pretty nifty with good range of formats and presets. Beware of the Open Candy offers if you decide to give it a go.

Another reasonable one was Format Factory, but it was a big download.

[Suff]

Hmmmm, I'll give it a go. I saw it mentioned but didn't go that far.

Large download is not an issue, I've got 60mbits here. I'll have a look at that too. 10 hours still to go on the current conversion round...

I've only ever stripped an mp3 from DVD once when Mrs S wanted Into the West from the return of the king soundtrack before it came out on CD. Can't remember what I used but it did the job. Most of the stuff in movies now I can get by other means. Sadly gomusicnow has finally gone, taking my last $10 with it. Then again it was not charging for the last 3 yeas so I had more than my $10 worth out of it...