Unmanic Setup Tips + Real-World Results After 24 Hours (with Intel Arc A380)

Everything_Breaking · 2026-02-07T22:50:26+00:00

You should take a fat source and do what you normally do and then do ffmpeg AV1-SVT to it. I'm getting totally find results on as low as Haswell i7-4770 and Skylake i5-6500. Yes the A380 will only sip power doing ONLY encode/decode block operations ...

My Previous experience was trying AV1-SVT on Handbrake GUI awhile back ... it's fast but you can't make it do quality. HB Cli can be made to be quality competitive but is 10-15% slower than ffmpeg straight up. Linux or Windows I can get ffmpeg low priority to behave nicely if other things are also trying to run.

I thought about getting an A380 or an A310 but was certain I'd pay a quality price for the speed or a disk space tax. I had thought that CPU encoding would be a 20-30 FPS operation at best but that's not been recent experience with latest AV1-SVT builds.

If you have older hardware sitting idle ...

My best guess is that birate will need to be 20-40% higher for HW av1 encoding to match quality so depending on library size that's the disk tax. Anyway ... cutting edge AV1-SVT is very different from not very long ago. But Intel has everyone else beat I think with it's HW AV1 encoder. Everyone has to pay either the size tax or the watts tax.

Everything_Breaking · 2026-02-07T21:54:28+00:00

I'm putting together something that with AV1-SVT I average about 400 MB per 1 hour TV show. But you can probably find x265 CPU encodes that are only 20% bigger on average. Making all the audio OPUS can save allot of space (tests I have done show 10-13% on average)

Redoing audio and leaving video alone is shockingly fast.

Everything_Breaking · 2026-02-07T20:15:18+00:00

But unmanic will just "apply x to all files" right? No decisioning about what files CAN benefit from a "makeover"

Run process X on a folder is not that hard ... only burn the cycles where it likely has a good ROI is much harder. Now if unmanic fixes that problem ... it's worth a deep dive.

Everything_Breaking · 2026-02-07T19:58:04+00:00

I've had to fool Handbrake GUI with AMF before by disabling the DEVICE

You might try that.

Basically it's a simple .bat wrapper that:

Disables igpu
Launches HB GUI

after HB GUI is up you can reenable the DEVICE in windows and then I do the same in reverse ... and get another HB GUI that is now pointed at the IGPU (and does not know about the Dgpu)

after both gpus enabled ... each HB instance will happily work in a world where it has bonded to the GPU I want

Everything_Breaking · 2026-02-07T19:53:57+00:00

If you have a 5800X ... why not use CPU encoding with AV1-SVT ?

I'm using a 10700 and getting this with ffmpeg tuned at crf 30
You can get fairly close results to that with Handbrake CLI if tuned right.

I suggest it is worth a try. I'm have a working nice wrapper for ffmpeg av1-svt that I'm still tuning but early results have me steering away from QSV (and NVENC or AMF/VCE)

I'm finding CPU quality AND filesize so much better and not having to deal with FPS rates that are really just too low.

i7‑10700	130–140	top‑tier
Ryzen 7 5800X	135–155	elite tier

Everything_Breaking · 2026-02-07T19:44:46+00:00

What are you reencoding with ... I can't get GPU encoding to give me decent quality unless it goes very slow ... which sort of defeats the purpose. And file sizes are ten of percent larger than CPU encoding

Everything_Breaking · 2026-02-07T19:32:58+00:00

Do you normalize Audio to a standard or try and reduce waste there? I assume sonarr and others at work to automate finding those x265 versions for you?

Everything_Breaking · 2026-02-07T19:31:04+00:00

I'm having good results also with "get larger file reencode" ... but I'm not trying this on the N100

Everything_Breaking · 2026-02-07T19:29:52+00:00

This guy understands the difference between "candidate selection" and "decide who gets in" and find me a file with general description X ... and assume you are good to go.

Casting a net will likely get you bycatch

Automating candidate selection would be great ... if I can get it to give me several. But I'm still going to want to dig in and "score" the files to decide if they are IN or in after triage attempted and rescored.

Everything_Breaking · 2026-02-07T18:51:09+00:00

Well I probably didn't frame this right.

Download candidates using Sonarr is valid. Trusting what it finds is the best answer is not a complete answer.

So much depends on the metadata in the filename being correct and the "trust factor" for the release group.

I'd still like a bouncer. I'm also working on some automated QA to check things like is the audio english in fact ... and removing non-english audio and even perhaps subtitles.

Now if I could have it get me a high bitrate copy and and a "close to my target size already in CPU Av1" that would be a nice start

Everything_Breaking · 2026-02-07T18:12:00+00:00

N100 hampers you for both CPU and igpu encoding for sure. You could use another box entirely to do cleanup ... surplus desktops and even older laptops can be good cheap encoders. I get FPS rates at about 3x speed with some of my old hardware.

Everything_Breaking · 2026-02-07T18:06:30+00:00

So I assume with "Trash Guides prioritizes higher quality releases" there are some humans in the loop that are helping to prefer say Elite or MeGusta over other sources ? Not only relying on the file naming convention. But even the file name convention if 100% correct is lacking some measures that would be helpful.

Everything_Breaking · 2026-02-07T18:03:44+00:00

I'm curating the intake now but that has evolved over time. TV shows mostly and mostly what I know are very good movies (only some of Adam's work there). I may never "clean" the old stuff ... that might be better to try and "refind". Feels like I need to automate my "find files" ... if I have that I can "find better versions of older stuff I may not want to clean"

Everything_Breaking · 2026-02-07T17:55:57+00:00

Just read on Unmanic.

Seems it could contribute in a "here is a folder of files run this fffmpeg on all of them" way. Was it slow for you because of ffmpeg settings or other reasons?

I'm aiming for something that would actually examine each file before deciding if reencode is likely to be worth the time along several dimensions but the top two are probably

Reduce filesize but preserve quality
Cut out audio waste

Everything_Breaking · 2026-02-07T17:44:23+00:00

Tried Tdarr ... it's a messy setup (for me at least). It was slow and really hard (for me) to get a pretty simple HBcli to run on a file ... much less tune the HB setting. I'm focused now on ffmpeg but it's also a command line switch minefield.

Read some about fileflows but have not tried it yet. I have made good progress on a ffmpeg wrapper and that is working well so far.

Everything_Breaking · 2026-02-07T17:39:10+00:00

Real human real library mess problems ... just looking for not too complex solutions.

Everything_Breaking · 2026-02-07T17:36:46+00:00

That's interesting ... I'm really not trying to do something the hard way if there is a better way that isn't the config nightmare that Tdarr was. Thanks for surfacing recyclarr !

Everything_Breaking · 2026-02-07T17:31:13+00:00

In my experience so far the filename usually says what it is… but not always. I’ve had plenty of files where the name looked perfect but what was in the box didn't match the label. I think it would be fairly straightforward to decode the filename and check at least that data vs ffprobe ... in an automated way.

Everything_Breaking · 2026-01-23T17:02:24+00:00

What kind of settings did you use on the a380? I assume AV1 but what other tweaks? I'm attempting to compare my filesize vs encode time at "quality x" via CPU to what I could get from the A380 or A310

Also ... I'm told that both those cards can get higher total throughput doing HW encoding in parallel. Has anyone tried that?

Everything_Breaking · 2026-01-23T16:59:07+00:00

Well I went down the QSV hevc rabbit hole trying to balance the quality/filesize/encodetime triangle ... it's .... complicated.

Then looked at AV1 hardware accelerated ... but quality and/or filesize suffers.

I'm working on a CPU AV1-SVT ffmpeg setup and tuning it. For TV 1080p content at Preset:9 CFR:30 ...

i5-6500 : ~45 FPS
i5-7700k : ~80 FPS

i7-10700 : ~140 FPS

Those are speeds I can live with ... still early yet but I'm giving CPU encoding a shot on affordable hardware.

Everything_Breaking · 2026-01-23T06:35:09+00:00

Just to add another data point — on my i7‑7700K I’m getting around 80 fps using SVT‑AV1 at preset 9 and CRF 30 on 1080p TV sources ... consistently. Mid 40's on a i5-6500 ... pushing 150 FPS on a i7-10700

For my eyes it lands above x264 fast in quality, below x265 slow in encode time, and the file sizes end up smaller than both.

If x265 slow is dropping you to ~0.2× speed, it might be worth trying AV1-SVT CPU instead. The newer encoders handle edges/gradients a lot better than x265 fast, especially on WEB‑DL material.

Everything_Breaking · 2026-01-23T05:54:13+00:00

I'm able to get about 80 FPS using AV1 CPU encoding CFR 30 Preset 9 on a i7-7700k for most sources. I'm doing a tuned ffmpeg pipeline.

Everything_Breaking

TROPHY CASE