Transcoding's Impact on PC Resources?

[SolihullRog]

I have had a lot of problems getting one particular movie to play properly.

I made various attempts at repairing it and converting it to different formats, and I finished up with 9 copies of it.

Eventually I tried transcoding, and found that it made every copy playable! So I'm considering transcoding every movie to give confidence that, in the future, every movie will play smoothly first time.

So I'd like to know more about the impact on my PC resources of doing this.

I've looked at C:\Users\{User}\AppData\Local\Conceiva\Logs\Mezzmo \Transcoding Files where there appears to be a file corresponding to each transcoded movie.

File sizes vary from 400MB to 8.5GB - averaging about 2GB per movie.

So I anticipate that, if I trancode everything, I can expect an impact of about 2GB per movie for my whole collection.

1. Does this sound right, and are there any other significant impacts?
2. The folder is referred to as "Transcoded files temporary folder". I don't get why it is referred to as 'temporary'. Wouldn't they be permanent in my scenario?
3. I try to minimise the amount of data on my c:\ drive. Can I simply change the location of the 'Transcoded files temporary folder', transcode everything, and then remove the folder from the c:\ drive?
4. I don't suppose there's an easy way of identifying high-resource-using movies? As a standard procedure I convert every movie to a format which complies with the spec (format, codecs, bitrate, frame size, fps etc) of my TV (Sony Bravia) but some still struggle to run. I can't identify a common factor between the culprits.

[Peter]

The transcoding folder is referred to as temporary because Mezzmo will delete older transcoded files once the maximum size of the transcoding folder is reached, so as long as you have assigned enough space in Transcoding Settings to the folder it will be permanent. You can move the transcoded files temporary folder to another drive in Transcoding Settings, Mezzmo will move all th existing transcoded files when you move the folder.

To identify high resource using movies you should check the bitrate of the movie. Movies with a high bitrate require more network bandwidth to stream and can result in problems if the TV does not get the movie data fast enough, if you find a movie that has problems streaming you should compare it's bitrate to the bitrate of a movie that streams without issues to try and find the best value for your network bandwidth.

[smitbret]

I have had a lot of problems getting one particular movie to play properly.

I made various attempts at repairing it and converting it to different formats, and I finished up with 9 copies of it.

Eventually I tried transcoding, and found that it made every copy playable! So I'm considering transcoding every movie to give confidence that, in the future, every movie will play smoothly first time.

So I'd like to know more about the impact on my PC resources of doing this.

I've looked at C:\Users\{User}\AppData\Local\Conceiva\Logs\Mezzmo \Transcoding Files where there appears to be a file corresponding to each transcoded movie.

File sizes vary from 400MB to 8.5GB - averaging about 2GB per movie.

So I anticipate that, if I trancode everything, I can expect an impact of about 2GB per movie for my whole collection.

1. Does this sound right, and are there any other significant impacts?
2. The folder is referred to as "Transcoded files temporary folder". I don't get why it is referred to as 'temporary'. Wouldn't they be permanent in my scenario?
3. I try to minimise the amount of data on my c:\ drive. Can I simply change the location of the 'Transcoded files temporary folder', transcode everything, and then remove the folder from the c:\ drive?
4. I don't suppose there's an easy way of identifying high-resource-using movies? As a standard procedure I convert every movie to a format which complies with the spec (format, codecs, bitrate, frame size, fps etc) of my TV (Sony Bravia) but some still struggle to run. I can't identify a common factor between the culprits.

To kind of build on what Peter said.....

If you can pre-transcode everything, then that's a good strategy as long as you have a temporary transcoding folder that is large enough to hold everything.

You said you had tried to convert to different formats but ended up with 9 copies (I would guess you are implying that none of them worked properly). It sounds like you did some pretty thorough research into the problem file. I don't know if you've tried analyzing the files with MediaInfo but that's a good start. You didn't say how you converted or what your settings were but there are some minute details that you didn't mention:

Profile Level and Profile:
http://i.imgur.com/0sifzTE.jpg (http://imgur.com/0sifzTE)

I took a screenshot of one of my video files run through MediaInfo. You can see where I highlighted "Format Profile". It is possible that you got everything correct (format, codecs, bitrate, frame size, fps etc) for the TV but if you had the profile and levels set too high then it would still fail to play properly if at all. You can see that my default is Main@L4.1. That is pretty conservative if the playback device is fairly new. Streaming video is kind of an afterthought with devices like TVs and BD Players and many lack the processing power to decode anything more than a file with the most basic settings.

For a truly universal file, the best container is probably .m4v/.mp4 with an h264 video stream and a 2 channel AAC audio stream, Base@L3.0. You could cheat up and go Base@L3.1 or Main@L3.1. It probably won't change the quality but it affects the efficiency so a file of the same quality will be larger with the less aggressive settings.

Video conversion can be a pretty big subject with lots of minutia.