Bulk conversions

[neoculture]

I hope I am posting this to the right forum group. If not, I deeply apologise.

First, a bit of background: A couple of years ago I built myself a fileserver (I bought a full-size rack from a company that was going out of business and figured I might as well put something in it) running linux and filled it with HDDs in a RAID 5 configuration. Why? Because I was tired of hunting down the DVD I wanted to watch. And the fileserver is hooked to Gb ethernet which my home-built HTPC accesses to play the videos.

So over the years I have ripped DVDs and BluRays using MakeMKV (love that software), both movies and TV series, as well as downloaded TV shows from the 'net (then bought and ripped the DVDs when they became available). And I watch a sh*tload of anime (currently collected 10.01% of all anime known to anidb). But after a few years, I am down to 2TB on my RAID5. Yes, I am looking at expanding the storage with a second server but I would also like to reduce the amount currently used.

So, I have a multitude of video files across my fileserver (AVI, MKV, FLV, etc...) with various video encodes (MPG2, h264, hi10p, etc...), some with subtitles (both soft and hard), some with chapters (generally, the stuff I ripped from disks).

What I want is to convert them all to a single (or as close to single) format across the lot, say h264 (pref hi10p) with subs (if present) and chapters (if present) but leaving the audio track untouched. Since the fileserver is running pretty much 24/7, I am not worried about doing things fast as it can simply crawl along through the filesystem - just automatically and in the background.

What I need is to write a set of scripts which will (a) identify any video files which are not in the format I want and then (b) kick off a conversion to create a new file in the right format. So the questions are: what can I use for (a) to easily identify the video codecs used by the files; and is Handbrake capable of doing (b) - i.e. keep the audio track as per original, automatically add the subtitle and/or chapter tracks if they exist, and convert the video track to my chosen format (h264, pref hi10p) and write it out to a MKV container? I am happy to write the control scripts on my own, but I want to make sure I am using the right tools.

Any thoughts?

[Smithcraft]

I think maybe MKVtoolnix might be a better tool for you to convert everything to mkv files.

As far as I know, Handbrake does not currently support Hi10 yet.

SC

[neoculture]

Except that MKVtoolnix is all about the manipulation of the MKV container - it does not handle codec conversions (while handbrake does, to some extent at least).

[Deleted User 11865]

As far as I know, Handbrake does not currently support Hi10 yet.

We support it as input, but we won't output it, no.

[Smithcraft]

What I want is to convert them all to a single (or as close to single) format across the lot, say h264 (pref hi10p) with subs (if present) and chapters (if present) but leaving the audio track untouched. Since the fileserver is running pretty much 24/7, I am not worried about doing things fast as it can simply crawl along through the filesystem - just automatically and in the background.

Since you didn't specify that you wanted to transcode the files, I suggested MKVtoolnix.

Since I have never really had good results transcoding files, I suggested MKVtoolnix.

There are some good scripters here that might be able to help you out if they come along.

And as Rodeo pointed out, Handbrake will accept a good number of codecs as source, but only outputs a couple of codecs and two containers.

SC