I’m trying to reduce the size of my video collection because I’m running out of storage.
My strategy is to look for smaller sized files to replace very large ones. When that fails, I am using handbrake to rencode. Its working, but very slowly due to my ancient computer. Redownloading is the much faster method.
Some titles, which were originally released as non-english, have existing small files, but the English audio is only available less commonly as a huge file.
Is it possible to redownload the non-english video and map the English audio onto it? It might be too much fooling around to get syncing correct.
Extra question, does anybody know how to set up sonarr/radarr to try to reduce filesize automatically? Ive been doing all the downloading by hand.
I do this with MKVToolNix, as long as the source and destination files are the same “cut” it will line up.
always a pickle to do, because it tends to always go out of sync. you’d have to find a way to get the timing right over the entire movie.
The easiest way to do this is to use a consumer end video editor to align the audio, then export the audio only, then do the mux operation.
My problems with that usually go beyond that, its weird the few times in my life I tried i had the audio matching up in the beginning where I set it right, and then eventually going way out of sync. Which is weird because you’d think well its the same movie, the timing would be the same as an audio file from a different version of it, but no such luck :(
Different versions of movies exist. They’re typically cut differently in slight ways throughout. How out of sync?
Major major out of sync. You can reproduce it I suppose the way I would attempt it, and maybe you know what I do wrong in such a case:
What I would do (to attempt doing it) is take two different versions of the movie, maybe one has good video quality but is in russian, and the other has a good english audio track with it right. And so I wanna take the audio track of the good one and lay it under the good footage in powerdirector. i’d try and find the right lineup for the audio to sync it with the video, but then eventually if you go further down the line in powerdirector (or even produce it and forward the movie like to halfway trough) the audio will be way out of sync. I think it may have to do with bitrates and stuff but I have no idea why. and heck I used to even work in the industry back in the early 90s for TV this should be a breeze for me. but this oldtimer is stupid, I think. there has to be a way to solve this, and if anyone has any suggestions you’re more than welcome to tell me because i’d love to know.
Does bro want to watch The Odyssey?
the old 1997 miniseries for sure, the modern one: naw, i’m good. :)
Yes, absolutely, but not in an automated way. Remuxers do this sometimes. They compare video, audio and subtitles from multiple releases and select the best one and frame sync them. However, the sync process is very manual and there are cases when different releases have different cuts, leading audio is in sync at the beginning but went out of sync later on, ruining the whole experience.
False. You can easily automate this with ffmpeg. It’ll just suck unless you know the cue points :p
That said, you could probably cook something up using OpenAI’s whisper (or something more recent; i’m not terribly familiar with transcription; or local models in general tbh) which you can run locally to get time stamps and then cut up and match starting points. Could be a fun project.
MakeMKV lets you mix and match files into a video container, so you can put a different audio track or sub track into the video.
You might have trouble with the sync if things don’t start at exactly the same time, but I think there are offset settings in there somewhere.
Yeah, pretty sure that can be done with SMPlayer too, at least with the animes I watch there are sometimes multiple audio tracks to choose from.
Pretty sure ffmpeg lets you extract audio channels from a video and even add them. You can probably look up the commands online, I don’t remember off the top of my head
To show all stream:
ffprobe -i FILESelect stream number with your audio.
To get stream X into AUDIO:
ffmpeg -i FILE -map X -c copy AUDIOTo put AUDIO onto FILE:
ffmpeg -i FILE -i AUDIO -c copy OUTPUTIf FILE only has 1 video and 1 audio, to replace FILE audio with AUDIO:
ffmpeg -i FILE -i AUDIO -map 0:v -map 1:a -c copy OUTPUTIt’s a mix of
--codec copyto not reencode the streams,--map 0:1to select the audio stream of the input file and for merging back you need multiple-iinput files and then--map 0:0to map the first input file’s video stream and--map 1to map the second input file (English audio stream). Mappings may vary - useffprobeto check your files.
LosslessCut will do this very easily.
Also, MKVToolnix will do this, but you will end up with MKV files (which are great anyways, but can’t be read by a few programs, but all good ones will be able to).
The other answers have already been helpful, so I wanted to ask, why do you have/want a video collection? Can’t you just delete it and download it again once you want to watch it again?
You can only rely on ready availability for certain shows/movies that are popular at the moment. Lots of stuff fades away over time. There’s some shows/movies that sit in the download queue for months (or still counting) for lack of seeds, and re-searching finds nothing. Sometimes even finding a single torrent is difficult or impossible. My Wanted lists in sonarr/radarr have many items where no torrent is ever found. Nobody is interested in them I guess. I’m sure they’re out there somewhere. Once I finally get my hands on them, I will only want to delete if it’s crap. I’d say about half my collection is fairly easy to replace and the other half was some kind of effort/luck to track down and might not be found again.
And I don’t feel like watching things right away after I get them, or doing work and waiting every time I want to watch something. Sometimes I hear about media, download it, then don’t watch for a while.
But it’s fine not to keep drives full of media if you don’t want to. Especially now with streaming torrents and stuff, it is very flexible. If your taste is coinciding with people who seed torrents, then you are in luck. There have been millions of TV shows and movies produced, it is much broader.
And I guess it is kind of a hobby. :)
You might want to look into Tdarr. Configure it once and let your old computer transcode away automatically.
For audio stream replacement - if you get the exact same video (same intro length, same scene lengths, same total length, etc.), you can easily replace the audio streams and it should work out.
ffmpegis your friend to do it lossless.Second tdarr for doing this to a large library but if it’s just a file or three mkvtoolnix and mkvextract is easier, tdarr can be kind of a nightmare to configure and documentation isn’t amazing
lol you weren’t kidding… the docs about how to set it up as a service in linux is a 30+ comment issue spanning 5 years.
Honestly that’s not even the worst bit. Like docker images exist that can get it running in no time. But then if you just want to say, scan your library and remove all languages for subtitles and audio that aren’t your native language? It’s definitely doable but a pain to setup. Even more so if you speak a second language or are like an anime person that hates dubs
