The Midnight Gospel Season 1 S01 (2020) Complete 1080p WEBRIP 10-bit x265 HEVC Opus AAC 5.1 [XannyFamily]

Welcome to 2021, my fellow pirates.

For my first release of the new year I wanted to try something a little different.

This is the full first season of The Midnight Gospel. Perfect for dropping acid to and the same as you'd get on Netflix except it's free. Know how much it costs per month? Zero. How cool is that?

"Well yeah this is a torrent site you dipshit, what's different about that?" I hear you ask.

Two things in the encoding process.

I will write a TL;DR here because I ended up getting pretty detailed. So if you don't care about the details: cartoons encode more efficiently using a 2 pass targeted bitrate than a CRF preset, and I tried out Opus as the default audio codec because it gets you higher quality at lower bitrates, but it's relatively new so I also included AAC tracks with each episode in case you have problems with Opus support. If your setup *did* support Opus letting me know what you're using would be very helpful to me so I can get an idea of how widely supported Opus is at the moment and if it's a good idea to use it more for things like TV shows without needing an AAC track to fallback on.

Full details for nerdy types who are curious:

Firstly, the video. As usual it is 10-bit x265. But next you might be wondering "what's the CRF?" There is none. I did a bunch of experimenting and, after a lot of fan noise and CPU cycles, came to the conclusion that CRF, while excellent for live action content, is not all that great for animation.

See the idea behind CRF is that when there is not much movement on the screen the bitrate goes up because your eye is drawn to the details, and when there is a lot of movement the bitrate goes down because the human eye cannot perceive the reduction in bitrate during a fast moving fight scene or car chase. This is what makes CRF based encoding so great for compressing movies without any loss in perceivable quality.

But already you can probably see where I'm going with this. In cartoons it you just have a bunch of bright colourful drawings changing constantly. And while some cartoons are more animated than others, CRF is often not the most efficient method of encoding them. This is why you see encodes where a single episode of Rick & Morty is like 1GB. Why is a 20 minute cartoon half the size of some full 1080p movies, even when x265 is used? Likely because it was encoded with the same presets you'd use for a movie. In other words that's inefficient encoding for the given source material.

One other thing about animation is it can still look very good at lower bitrates compared to live action content. This is true even on large screens assuming a normal viewing distance. I tried it myself on a 60" 4K TV. As long as you don't go too low (you don't want to end up with blocking do you?) there's no real need for high bitrate cartoons. This was another trial and error process but I believe I found the magic spot.

(P.S. Can you tell my Adderall is working? I think it might be working.)

The point of my mini essay is I have, through a lot of testing and tweaking, refined a preset for encoding animations as x265 in the most efficient way possible while retaining the same perceivable quality. How efficiently? The first time I tried to encode the first episode of this show with the usual CRF method it came out as over 800MB. I tried increasing the CRF to 23 and using the "slow" preset and that got it down to just over 600MB. I thought this is unacceptable the experimenting began.

When all was said and done I had encoded the entire show with a time consuming 2 pass bitrate based setup instead. The quality is brilliant and the file sizes mostly hang around the 280-320MB mark. Much better!

The second thing that's a little experimental is the audio codec. The primary audio track for these encodes is Opus. You can do your own reading into Opus, but put simply, it produces the highest quality at the lowest bitrate of any lossy audio codec out there. According to Wiki: "several blind listening tests have ranked it higher-quality than any other standard audio format at any given bitrate until transparency is reached, including MP3, AAC, and HE-AAC."

Basically what this means to you is I can encode content with Opus audio at a bitrate as low as 192kbps and it should sound as good as AC3, EAC3, or even AAC at a higher bitrate. Opus always uses a sample rate of 48kHz too making it ideal for video content. Multi-channel (surround sound) audio could require a higher bitrate so I used one, but still much lower than I could for AC3 or EAC3.

I have also included, with each episode, an AAC track in case your software or hardware does not support Opus. It was first released in 2012 so it is pretty new. It is supported by VLC and ffmpeg. Most media players use ffmpeg as a backend so Opus support usually depends on if the developers decided to implement it from the ffmpeg project. If you use Plex or Emby or something similar it should play Opus if your streamer supports it, otherwise it will just transcode to AAC automatically anyway.

This is why I consider it "experimental" as it's not supported by everything like AAC or AC3 are and I felt the need to include an AAC track for compatibility. But I would really appreciate input here. I know you guys have all sorts of different setups so if you can get let me know the setup you use, if Opus played, and if it needed to be transcoded or not, I'd appreciate it so I know how practical it is to use Opus more often in the future without needing to include AAC.

(Seriously, Adderall is insane.)

Right okay sorry... I will shut up now... if you made it this far, I hope you at least found it interesting.

Now enjoy the show! And seed it too!

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Media info for first episode:

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