I don't compress my MKV's, but I watch them on a large screen with high end audio, so I prefer 100% blu-ray quality.
Compressing MKVs is a bit of a misnomer , MKV is just a container and the file can hold a compressed format. Blu-Ray quality is also the same, BluRay is just a optical disc format and has no bearing on the quality of video on it. I know I'm arguing semantics, but it really is a misleading usage of the terms.
You are dead right, and I take no offense to calling me out on it.
I figure that anyone who deals with MKV's understands what I mean, but you certainly have a point.
So to rephrase: I prefer to stick to the video format found on blu ray discs rather than add compression to save space.
I thought about compressing the movies. I am up to 20tb and need to expand storage soon. Keeping them backed up is the part that sucks, lol. Every time I add 8 or 16tb of storage I have to double it for back up... But like I said, I don't like the idea of compressing the rips.
Isnt theaverage BluRay uncompressed rip like 50 gigs? You'd be filling up all that space and only have room for about 400 movies. Even if you re-encoded with VBR/VFR you could likely reduce the data footprint by half with no detectable loss in quality. Im not an audiophile or videophile and x265 is pretty amazing considering the file sizes it puts out. I have yet to watch a 1080P rip in x265 and think "man this looks an sounds like hot garbage"
I'd really suggest you compress one with x265 or another format of your choosing then compare it against the original and see if worth keeping the larger format. My Plex is only rocking an 8TB data drive and Im no where near capacity. My average 1080Bluray x265 MKV is like 6GB so I could hold over 1,000 movies (but I cycle stuff in and out all the time) I do archive some of the harder to find movies on my NAS but I couldn't imagine full back ups. I'd just redownload in the event of a catastrophic drive failure.
The average is around 25gb, some as big as 35-37, some as little as 15. I am at about 400 TV shows, 650 movies, and a few thousand songs and sitting just under 20tb. The TV shows are mostly compressed quite a bit, most of the songs are MP3, but about 200 of them are FLAC, and all the movies are from blu ray and about 600 of those movies are not compressed further after ripping. UHD can get bigger, my biggest is around 60mb, but I only have about a dozen UHD in my library so far.
Some people say there is no loss in quality when further compressing movies off blu ray, some say there is. I have not done direct A/B comparisons yet, but I do have some downloaded movies that are compressed to anywhere from 700mb to 7gb, and I do notice a loss in fidelity over what I expect from 1080p. Artifacts, banding, and aliased edges are common. It is far more noticeable when you get over a 120" display though.
I don't consider myself any kind of "phile", but I AM in the process of building a theater that costs an obscene amount of money (at least to me). So I would bet that my perspective on this is probably a little different from yours. That being said, when I get some time I will definitely compress a movie and do an A/B comparison to the raw ripped version, because I will always be the first to admit that it could just be bias. Knowing that most of my movies on the server are the same exact quality as if played off the blu ray disc is a comfort, and maybe on some level it makes me feel better about my purchases.
There are other reasons to not spend the time compressing my media, first and foremost being that I can notice a loss of fidelity between CD (or FLAC) over MP3. When listening in my car or at work or even around the house with the WHA system, I don't hear a difference, but in a critical listening environment, I can definitely notice the difference. So when you consider that I take my movies far more seriously (i.e. nearly always watching on a higher fidelity system), it makes sense to me to not waste the time. When you add in the amount of time to compress the library coupled with the fact that the added storage only costs a small fraction of my overall theater budget, it makes a lot of sense for me.
Backups do take time, but since I ripped all my blu rays myself, and I only own about 350 of them, the hundreds of hours to replace them would be far more costly than a few 8tb drives. I either red boxed or borrowed the rest of the blu rays, so I would be stuck downloading compressed versions if I lost mine. The backup drives I have been buying are cheaper when you buy USB drives but have no warranty once you crack it open. They are not fast, even internally they are half the speed of a WD Red in a NAS unit, and a quarter the speed of a WD Red Pro. But I can automate backups fairly easily...
Now that my gigabit internet is installed, I paid for a VPN and started fleshing out my library with compressed movies. I try to find the stuff that is only compressed down to about 7gigs, but I sometimes have to settle for the ones really compressed down to like 1.5gb or 700mb. I only have a couple of those. And I only have 1 dvd in my collection, because it was not available on bluray.
As for AMDs, they've been the slightly slower more affordable chip for as long as I can remember. I only used to use them in my teens because they were cost effective (ie super cheap and I was dirt poor). They aren't terrible by any stretch of the imagination; but I'd rather drop the coin on the intel CPUs. I love my Kabylake i7 , I didnt go for the coffee lake because the increase in L2+L3 cache wasnt significant enough to me and I wasnt going to take advantage of the slightly faster DDR4 speeds. I'm sure more stuff in the future will make better use of the 6/12 but I can live with 4/8 for now.
I can't disagree. AMD was also always less efficient, at least starting with the Athlon days, but a decent fan overcame that just fine. I just didn't have good luck with Athlon processors personally, and then there was that one that caught fire... But I built a lot of computers in the 90's and 2000's, and AMD was always a good budget choice. I've stuck with Intel religiously since Core for my own computers. My last upgrade was from gen3 i5 to Kabylake i7, and the gen3 is in my Plex server now.