It can save data by excluding data streams that you don’t need. For instance, I don’t need French, Italian, Japanese, German 5.1 audio streams that each have 700Mbps bitrates or higher, nor do I need an English 1.5Gbps master audio stream, a 700 Mbps English stream, a 500 Mbps descriptive audio for the blind, and 5 different special edition commentary tracks for a film I’ll watch once or twice. All those tracks can really add up, and torrent sites are often country or language specific, so remuxes might have original language and/or native language audio only.
Comment on File size preference for Radarr?
voracitude@lemmy.world 5 months ago“Remuxing preserves the original video and audio quality because it doesn’t involve any compression”
techreviewadvisor.com/what-does-remux-mean/
So, what you said - it’s a 1:1 copy of the source. With no compression. Which is what I said, as far as I can tell?
What I don’t understand is why the article says it allows for smaller file sizes, when I’ve found without fail that remuxes are the largest variety by far. It made sense to me that a file produced without compression would be larger than the same file, compressed.
FlightyPenguin@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Maxy@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
Ah, it looks like we have a small misunderstanding. I thought you were talking about uncompressed video, which is enormous. This is only used in HDMI cables for example. A 1080p60 uncompressed video is 2.98Gbit/s, or about 1.22 terabytes per hour.
A remux is “uncompressed” in the sense that it isn’t recompressed, or in this case transcoded. A remux is still compressed, just to a lesser degree than a transcode. This means the files are indeed larger, but the quality is also better than transcodes.
To clarify the article’s confusing statement: they claim that remuxes can reduce size by throwing away some audio streams, while keeping the original video. This is true, but the video itself hasn’t gotten any smaller: you are simply throwing away other information.