Yesterday, I found a quick iTunes tip explaining how to set custom Album Art. In this post, Derek makes reference to something I'd been weighing in my mind lately but never did any followup on: The pro's and con's of taking time to convert my entire video archive to MP4 in efforts of finally having one application (iTunes 7) span multiple internal and external drives and provide a visual reference to Movies, TV Shows, and Songs. In this post, I'm going to share the results of a few tests run on short 30min TV shows - I expect the results to differ for larger 700MB movies. Here's what we have so far...

Sitting on 2+TB of combined Audio and Video, the questions that immediately come to mind are:

Size: Can I save space while maintaining quality?
Time: How long will it take to convert it all?

As Derek pointed out in his post,

"In preparation for the arrival of the Apple TV, as well as my continued streaming content hanits via iTunes to computers throughout the house, I make it a regular habit to convert DVD’s into smaller, more manageable, MP4 files. Additionally, rather than manually managing my audio & video library, I trust in iTunes’ ability to break down the content directory by artist and album. In the case of video content, movies & TV shows. In iTunes I trust.

So we've established how to convert DVD's to MP4, but what about existing archives (commonly in AVI format)? Since this obviously will take more thought, I'm going to make some general observations now and update as I have more results to share:

Size

The first application I tried was iSquint v1.5 for OSX. After encoding a small test video in each of the five (Tiny, Low, Standard, High, Go Nuts) settings, I settled on High to maintain the quality, as Standard provided a drastically poorer picture (although the files were approximately 50% of the original size).

The following few tests were carried out on my trusty Mac Pro 2.66 / 4GB RAM. With quality set to High, and using H.264 encoding, the original 175MB 20min show was reduced an average of 25MB (or 15%) through the conversion. This took ~10min and maintained a steady 50% CPU usage (4 processors) across the board.

Extrapolating these numbers gives us the following scenario:

Let's assume that you keep complete archives of your favorite TV shows, and that the average archive spans 5 seasons.

5 seasons x ~20 episodes = 100 x 25MB = 2.5GB space savings per show.

If you consider that many shows (off the top of my head: Simpsons / Top Gear / Law & Order / etc..) span 10+ seasons, the savings adds up. On 1TB of video, this could result in saving upwards of 150GB - the size of some external drives.

Time

So in theory, converting to MP4 could save you some space, but is this reasonable in terms of time? If we figure 100 episodes will take 1000 minutes (~17hrs) to convert, you'll need to have a surplus of not only CPU power, but disk space to use as a sandbox while automated batches are encoded. So again, we're estimating trimming 2.5GB per 17hrs, which comes out to roughly 150MB / hr. Fascinating.

When time allows, I'll investigate more with larger files and let you know the results. Also, there are a few other applications that look to be worth trying. And after it's all converted and imported (keeping in mind that iTunes will allow you to span multiple sources for those with gigantic libraries), the fun of getting all of the metadata sorted out begins.

What's your opinion?

I'm interested to hear any / all thoughts on this... Why / why not to make the move, and also how you, the user, manage your video/audio collections? Or am I completely out in left field on this one? Let me know.