Option to transcode video only, leave audio untouched

[sdust]

When transcoding, the bandwidth savings for down converting audio are insignificant plus 5.1 audio is gone. Can we have an option to leave the audio alone?

Instead of ffmpeg parameters:

-c:a aac -ac 2 -b:a 192k -filter:a aresample=async=1

can we have an option to switch to:

-c:a copy

[eric]

@eric

Because we don't support transcoding to mpeg2 or h.265, we must transcode those formats to be able to provide Adaptive Bitrate streaming — our player cannot seamlessly handle the codec changing on the fly when switching from one bitrate to another.

We have decided that Adaptive Bitrate streaming is much more important for the seamless experience of our customer base vs not transcoding original content. If a user specifically does not want transcoding, they can set the Quality to Original to opt out of transcoding and the Adaptive Bitrate streaming.

As discussed above, we must have consistent codecs across bitrates. A 384kbit EC3 stream would be half of the available bitrate for video for the 800kbps stream, which would not be acceptable quality.

Because of that, we must re-encode anything that isn’t AAC to AAC.

[sdust]

@eric

we must re-encode anything that isn’t AAC to AAC.

I am not quite convinced this is really the case. Some faulty assumptions were probably made on the path to reaching this conclusion.
How about a user configurable option to not transcode audio unless streaming at, say, 2Mbps or below?

[eric]

@sdust

Some faulty assumptions were probably made on the path to reaching this conclusion.

Closing the thread because you continue to not understand how to interact appropriately here.