I used to seed in the old days, but I feel it has become more complicated now.
The primary issue (before eg.: CGNAT or port-opening issues) is it’s become more and more often the case that I post-process what I download before use (rename / reencode music albums, reencode movies) so it makes little sense to keep the old files only for seeding. In theory a “seedbox” (those are the trendy thing this decade, right?) would help solve this, but I’m still rather new and have not found any FOSS, PII-free offerings in the market.
Exactly the situation I’m facing. Despite torrents being a popular choice, it just doesn’t provide an easy way to manage your seeds.
Of course I have found some potential solutions. Seedbox is one of them. There’s also the *arr suite, which is a more local solution that utilises hard links - but im not sure if it’ll be effective if you want to reencode.
I have an *arr suite back at home (and had one back at work, once). It’s quite local yes but I feel that to be to its advantage in this case since it’s for downloading, not uploading. No advantage if I want to reencode, since in an *arrsetup you just post-process the files as usual and remove the originals. OTOH, you can easily connect it to your Jellyfin, mpd, etc…, but by that point I just connect the folder with the post-processed stuff.
Exactly this. I don’t need 1080P or 4k mp4 rips with 10bit audio, and I definitely don’t have the storage for it, but when that’s all that is seeding, its usually quicker to just download it and re-encode.
This pretty much. I’ve never understood the point of something like The_Avengers.[4K][8K][16][Dolby_7.18_3D][128subs].mkv… what, do people want to take note of The Hulk’s groin warts?
For stuff like animation content, even 720p is too much unless it’s content from the last ~5 years. Anything before Infinity Train does pretty well on 540p or 480p with 96k audio, and if I’m looking for a movie from the 80s, let alone a black-and-white from the 50s, I’m certainly not interested in a 8K rip that would naturally have to be an AI upscale.
I kinda started a “seedbox” for at least my niche torrents. Most of the mainstream things I download I don’t normally leave to seed that long as there’s already plenty seeding, but a lot of the documentaries or other things that only have single or double digits seeding I’ll make a copy and leave it to seed for a while. I used to host my Plex server from that PC and when I build my new dedicated server I left the storage intact, but transferred my whole library over, so I have a large amount of unused space doing nothing else.
I’m also fairly new to all this. I’m now using Jellyfin for selfhosting. What’s the benefit of enencoding everything?
In my experience at least, the two primary benefits (and sometimes, the only benefits) of re-encoding are 1.- reduced file size and 2.- increased device compatibility.
The file size is relevant because you can fit more stuff for essentially the same quality: reencoding a FLAC album to ~160k Opus uses up only 1/5th to 1/4th of the space, ~196k Opus is 1/4th to 1/3rd of the space, so it can be a pretty good gain on aggregate. A movie in 4K is worth nearly 6 movies in 1080p and nearly 9 movies in 720p, and for ~95% of extant content in the world rebasing down from 4K to at least 1080p presents no practical loss.
The compatibility is usually only relevant when you want to have that content be easily accessible in eg.: a remote media server, a streaming system, or one of those gool ol’reliable MP3 thumbsticks. In those cases, you’d be reencoding audio from FLAC to MP3 to increase device compatibility (and getting some decent space savings too). If your Jellyfin server’s connection is over wifi or you’ll access the data outside of your local network, re-encoding to lower sizes means transmission requires less bandwidth, as well as other savings (incl.: energy consumption in aggregate).
I used to seed in the old days, but I feel it has become more complicated now.
The primary issue (before eg.: CGNAT or port-opening issues) is it’s become more and more often the case that I post-process what I download before use (rename / reencode music albums, reencode movies) so it makes little sense to keep the old files only for seeding. In theory a “seedbox” (those are the trendy thing this decade, right?) would help solve this, but I’m still rather new and have not found any FOSS, PII-free offerings in the market.
Exactly the situation I’m facing. Despite torrents being a popular choice, it just doesn’t provide an easy way to manage your seeds.
Of course I have found some potential solutions. Seedbox is one of them. There’s also the *arr suite, which is a more local solution that utilises hard links - but im not sure if it’ll be effective if you want to reencode.
I have an *arr suite back at home (and had one back at work, once). It’s quite local yes but I feel that to be to its advantage in this case since it’s for downloading, not uploading. No advantage if I want to reencode, since in an *arrsetup you just post-process the files as usual and remove the originals. OTOH, you can easily connect it to your Jellyfin, mpd, etc…, but by that point I just connect the folder with the post-processed stuff.
Exactly this. I don’t need 1080P or 4k mp4 rips with 10bit audio, and I definitely don’t have the storage for it, but when that’s all that is seeding, its usually quicker to just download it and re-encode.
This pretty much. I’ve never understood the point of something like
The_Avengers.[4K][8K][16][Dolby_7.18_3D][128subs].mkv… what, do people want to take note of The Hulk’s groin warts?For stuff like animation content, even 720p is too much unless it’s content from the last ~5 years. Anything before Infinity Train does pretty well on 540p or 480p with 96k audio, and if I’m looking for a movie from the 80s, let alone a black-and-white from the 50s, I’m certainly not interested in a 8K rip that would naturally have to be an AI upscale.
I kinda started a “seedbox” for at least my niche torrents. Most of the mainstream things I download I don’t normally leave to seed that long as there’s already plenty seeding, but a lot of the documentaries or other things that only have single or double digits seeding I’ll make a copy and leave it to seed for a while. I used to host my Plex server from that PC and when I build my new dedicated server I left the storage intact, but transferred my whole library over, so I have a large amount of unused space doing nothing else.
I’m also fairly new to all this. I’m now using Jellyfin for selfhosting. What’s the benefit of enencoding everything?
In my experience at least, the two primary benefits (and sometimes, the only benefits) of re-encoding are 1.- reduced file size and 2.- increased device compatibility.
The file size is relevant because you can fit more stuff for essentially the same quality: reencoding a FLAC album to ~160k Opus uses up only 1/5th to 1/4th of the space, ~196k Opus is 1/4th to 1/3rd of the space, so it can be a pretty good gain on aggregate. A movie in 4K is worth nearly 6 movies in 1080p and nearly 9 movies in 720p, and for ~95% of extant content in the world rebasing down from 4K to at least 1080p presents no practical loss.
The compatibility is usually only relevant when you want to have that content be easily accessible in eg.: a remote media server, a streaming system, or one of those gool ol’reliable MP3 thumbsticks. In those cases, you’d be reencoding audio from FLAC to MP3 to increase device compatibility (and getting some decent space savings too). If your Jellyfin server’s connection is over wifi or you’ll access the data outside of your local network, re-encoding to lower sizes means transmission requires less bandwidth, as well as other savings (incl.: energy consumption in aggregate).