Transcoding is one of the most demanding tasks for your PC, translating to a time-consuming process for the end user. Encoding a single video can take days, depending on the PC’s specifications, the codec used, and the source video’s characteristics. That’s where multiple PCs and an app like Tdarr can be a lifesaver.
If you have more than one PC in your home network, why not let them lend a helping hand when transcoding media? Tdarr can turn all your PCs into nodes of the same networked transcoder, resulting in much faster audio and video encoding. Let’s see how.
What Is Tdarr?
Sonarr, Radarr, and their “siblings” were created to assist with media piracy. However, unlike the other apps in the pirate-y “…arr” family, Tdarr differs in two crucial ways, justifying why we’ve decided to use it for this guide:
After setting it up, Tdarr can help you “unify” your media collection, whose files are spread on various devices. you may alwayscompress videos to reduce their file sizeyourself, but why not completely delegate the task to Tdarr?
Best of all, after you set it up, it works automatically while taking advantage of the hardware capabilities of the “nodes” in your network: Windows desktop PCs, Linux servers, ARM-based Chromebooks, or your shiny new Mac.
For this article, we’ll see how you can set it up and use it on two Windows-based PCs on the same home network.
How to Install Tdarr
Despite being a relatively complicated collection of separate scripts and tools, Tdarr’s installation is straightforward.
Tdarr’s Hardware Requirements
You can run the Tdarr server and the node software on any PC and access its interface through almost any browser. However, your hardware’s performance and features can significantly affect encoding speeds.
For example, a node running on a modern AMD Ryzen CPU will encode the same video in a blink compared to a ten-year-old Intel Celeron.
Another node, using Nvidia’sNVEnchardware encoder for transcoding, will, in turn, be much faster than the AMD Ryzen CPU, but will also produce lower quality or larger files.
So, if you find Tdarr’s encoding too slow, you have two options:
Apart from that, you can run Tdarr even on a ten-year-old laptop if you can tolerate slow encoding speeds.
What About Tdarr’s Codecs?
We won’t go into detail about what codecs are and how they work. However, we must mention that the codecs and encoders you choose are the most important factor for Tdarr’s encoding performance and quality of produced results.
With the above in mind, here’s a list of the codecs worth using with Tdarr for re-encoding your media files. The closer a codec is to the top, the better the output quality, the higher its requirements, and the slower the encoding time.
How to Configure Tdarr
Tdarr’s core is its server, which provides a browser-accessible interface for the app, manages media, and orchestrates encoding among various nodes. The server doesn’t do any encoding on its own. For that, it needs at least one node.
Each node can have its own configuration and run locally on your PC or another computer on the same network. Nodes are responsible for media analysis, health checks, re-encoding, etc.
The server controls all nodes, how they act on media, and manages files.
Tdarr’s nodes come pre-configured for running on the “local” PC without requiring a network. Thus, if you only plan to use Tdarr on a single PC, you only have to configure its server (apart from minor node tweaks).
Configuring Your Tdarr Server
For this article, we’ll see how you can configure Tdarr Server from scratch without importing an existing media collection. Have you got a media library set up? You can modify the paths we’ll use to point to your existing folders to have Tdarr process and re-encode them.
If you wish, you can control the rate at which Tdarr scans the Incoming folder for new files. To do that, move to your library’sSourcetab, scroll down a bit, and change the number in theFolder watch scan intervalfield underFolder watch settings.
Similarly, right below, you can tell it to run an hourly scan and define how manyFile scanner threadsthat will use. If you store your media on NVMe or SSD drives, increasing the number of File scanner threads can boost performance.
Older mechanical HDDs, though, take a significant hit in performance when trying to access files in parallel, so it’s best not to exceed the default value of “2” for those. you’re able to also enable the option toHold files after scanningand define how long (in seconds) those files will remain locked to ensure other apps won’t interfere with them.
Your library’sFilterstab lets you define resolutions and codecs you’d prefer to skip. If, for example, you want Tdarr only todownscalevideos, you can enter all the popular lower resolutions up to your monitor’s native resolution (like “360p”, “720p”, and “1080p”), separated by commas in theResolutions to skip field.
TheCodecs to skipfield works similarly. For example, if you type “AV1, HEVC” in that field, Tdarr won’t try re-encoding video files already compressed with those codecs.
To have Tdarr process your files, it will have to watch the incoming folder to detect changes (AKA: new files). For that, visit your library’sSourcetab and flick the switch next toFolder watchto the right.
Customizing Tdarr’s Nodes & Encoding
Tdarr requires at least one active node to act on your media, so it’s time to turn our attention to them.
You can see the result when it’s done if you scroll to theStagingsection where, in our case, the status of our file was “Transcode Success”, and its size was down to around 49 MB. TheHandlingfield on the right offers three buttons for controlling the entries of this list.
Using those, you can requeue, skip, or accept an encode. You can find the re-encoded version of your file inside the “Ready” folder.
Network & Hardware-Accelerated Encoding
Tdarr is best when using all the CPU and GPU power of all PCs on your local network for re-encoding your files. However, that’s a bit more complicated to set up.
For this part of our guide, we take for granted that you have more than one PC, and they can “see” each other through your local network. You’ve got the PCs but haven’t “networked them” yet? Choose a networking approach from our collection ofdiagrams on which to base your home network for full connectivity, and then follow our guide onhow to set up a secure home network.
Set Up Your Auto-Multi-Hyper-Encoder With Tdarr
Setting up complicated automation software like Tdarr can take a while and occasionally make you wonder why something doesn’t work as intended. When you set it up, though, Tdarr feels like magic.
Add its server and nodes to your computers' auto-startup sequences, and hey presto, your media will always be re-encoded to high-quality, smaller files, using the optimal resolutions and formats for every single “machine” in your network. All while taking advantage of all available CPUs and GPUs in your PCs without you having to lift a finger.
