110GB+ worth of photos/videos on a microSD memory card #2

In my previous post, I talked about wanting to write a script to see how far I can squeeze 110GB worth of media (photos and videos).

I wrote the script the quick-and-dirty way, in PHP. When people think of PHP, they think of web pages, but PHP can equally be used for writing your everyday scripts, just like Perl or Python.

The script resizes all photos to a maximum width/height of 1024. I found this provides maximum size reduction for the photos without sacrificing the viewing quality in full photo mode on my tablet (screen resolution: 1280x800). Obviously it will affect the quality when zooming in, but I rarely do that when flipping through the photos. Since I haven't got a tablet with retina display yet, I am not sure how that will fare, but for this exercise, I am sacrificing quality for size.

For videos, I use handbrake-cli to transcode all of them to MP4 with a maximum width of 640. Again, this reduces the size drastically, improves compatibility (since all Android tablets/smartphones I have come across so far can play MP4 with no problems) and looks OK quality-wise on my tablet.

The script takes a source directory and replicates the folder structure in a target directory. It transcodes all files with certain extensions (configurable in config.php) and places them in the corresponding target subdirectories. If the file has already been transcoded, it will not be transcoded again, so it will be relatively quick to update the target directory after adding more files to the source directory.

The script took 1.5 days to transcode my 110GB collection (bear in mind this is a older, slower AMD Turion II laptop). The result was only 29GB and fits easily into a 32GB microSD card.

I popped the microSD card into my tablet and viewed the files using QuickPic. The result was awesome.Check it out in the video below:

Note that this video was produced with the microSD card inserted into an al-cheapo single-core tablet bought for the kids during a sale. I was pleasantly surprised by how quick and smooth it was. Needless to say, on my own 10" quad-core tablet, the result was even better.

QuickPic is a better app than Gallery for this purpose because:

1. It allows you to set "Include Folders" to include only the media files from the microSD card

2. It lets you set the 'Explorer View" to browse through the folders/subfolders in a hierarchical manner.

3. It has "Stack", "Grid" and "List" views for different visual summaries of the folder content.

4. It is quick and has tons of other options.

The result of the transcoding operation exceeded all my expectations. I have a snapshot of 110GB worth of media on a tiny memory card, ready to be popped into any tablet or PC to view. At only 29GB, there's lots of room for growth, especially on a 64GB microSD card (which no doubt all tablets will support in the future, even cheapo ones).

If you think you might find this useful, you can download the script below. It includes the PHP and Handbrake-CLI binaries so it should be ready to run under Windows. It shouldn't be too difficult to adapt the script to work under other platforms as well.

After download, unzip into another directory and edit config.php. You only need to change $srcdir and $tgtdir. Then bring up a command prompt and run transcode.

Once you verify that everything works correctly, you may want to schedule it to run periodically via the Task Scheduler.

Download: Batch Media Transcoder V1.0 (ZIP 25.2MB)

Download: Batch Media Transcoder V1.0 (7-ZIP 17.1MB)