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.
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. :)