anikey wrote:maybe just leave it in one file?

Yeah as of now that's probably what I will do when uploading

Well, then there are two choices: either you force everyone to seed all languages (by putting them in one file) or you accept that some languages might be lost (by splitting audio tracks into separate files and/or torrents).

This is more of a matter of balance, i.e. what is convenient for the users? How much free space are they willing to give up (for the sake of other languages)? How much disk space do they even have? Some people have terabytes upon terabytes of disks, others not so much.

Maybe researching past experience is useful? Like, what other seeders do (whether on I2P or on clearnet - because disk space is independent of the network), how they deal with such situations. Learning from those who were doing such a thing before you.

Edit: maybe just leave it in one file? (if no further discussion is allowed, that would be personally my final answer, i just feel like answering that)

I somewhat agree with igillis here, just because these languages aren't this popular - especially here on I2P - doesn't mean that we should just reduce the quality of these dubs or even refuse to provide them at all. I actually think that with providing a bigger portfolio of high quality content the community will slowly grow which we all profit off of.

The next thing that came to my mind is finding seeders. When separating the torrent into one with the most popular languages and one with the lesser popular ones, then who is seeding the latter? In my case storage is something I care about - don't get me wrong there's still plenty of space on my NAS - but if I need sort out "useless" files to free up my storage the "unfamous" dubbed version will be one of the first things that'll be deleted - and thus the (probably) only seeder is gone and no one can get their hands on these languages.

Dear friends, 50 percent of a feature film consists of the sound. One should be careful with the idea that the compression of other languages into an inferior quality is sufficient. Hearing ability does not depend on nationality.

When separating into individual torrents, there is the added expense of administration. You need to explain well where the originals and the soundtracks are located, in all the descriptions associated with the medium. You can't assume that everyone knows the technical basics of video editing, but you have to make sure that everything runs smoothly and also explain how the loose audio tracks are integrated.

In view of the file sizes that are now distributed here, I don't really see any obstacles to leaving everything as it is, i.e. putting all the video and audio tracks together with the subtitles in one container.

Another alternative would be to limit the video to two or three audio tracks in the languages that are commonly used here. You can also offer to provide the other available languages on request. Whether you then deliver them in a container together with the video can be decided on a case-by-case basis in conversation with the people on site.

A couple of highly compressed extra audio tracks is okay, but not if they're doubling the overall file size. In your case with 10 extra audio tracks I think it's better to leave the movie with only its original audio and to deliver the dubbings separately. 10 LQ stereo tracks with say 128 kb/s maybe, but all of them 6-channel at 384 kb/s, that's a bit too much.

I did such a separation with Alita: Battle Angel and with one or two other torrents. Nobody complained.

Alita - Battle Angel (2019) [2160p HDR10+]
Alita - Battle Angel (2019) [AUDiO ONLY]

Reducing audio quality is possible but this would somewhat ruin the experience for everyone that has a somewhat decent sound system at home (or just really good headphones with 5.1 / 7.1 channel support), soooo meh

As of now the whole file is 9,5 GiB, 4,5 of which are audio tracks - almost half the size. Separating it into 2 files would make 14,5 GiB (2x 5 GiB video-data + 4,5 GiB audio data) which is def. a whole lot more than just 9,5.

And you're right, finding seeds for a single audio track will be a problem...

I think I'll go with 1 torrent for all languages

If the audio quality is not a must, you could always downsample the other audios to 128kb/s AAC, and leave the original one in 7.1 or 5.1.

Personally i think that having 2 video files is not a good idea, since the video is the heavier part in most of the cases.(duplicated data)

If you use 128kb/s audio , then the size comes down pretty easily, to around 100mb or 125mb per audio file,depending on duration.

If the quality of the audio is important to you, you could always make 1 torrent with the original audio (english in most of the cases) and other with the audio files. The problem with this will be that not much people will download those audios, and they could be sedless in a few weeks or months.

You can easily downsample an audio file with ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i INPUT.ac3 -c:a aac -ac 2 OUTPUT.m4a
^Gives the 128kb/s aac audio, with a size around 100mb

You can also do this with the original video file, selecting the proper audio stream using 'map' function in ffmpeg.

This actually sounds like a valid approach. I guess I'll wait and see what other users think about this and maybe I'll provide separate audio files

I might say a pretty wild idea, but what if you split all of them into separate video and audio files?

E.g if the video's "original" language is English, leave it in the file (for convenience), and split out the rest with ffmpeg or similar software into different files, put into 1 torrent, and tell the users to choose files.
Then if a user wants a language other than English (or whatever "original" one), tell them to choose the relevant audio file and merge them back. (this might not be that slow if you use codec "copy").

Other than that approach, i'd say the more "globally" efiicient, in my opinion, is where you leave all tracks in one file, because then the video data is not duplicated.

Regarding your approach where you split into 2 files, i think it'll be good to put the tracks you think would be more "popular" into one file (maybe even less than 6), and the less "popular" ones into another. So that the more popular will be downloaded more. Maybe even put them in separate torrents?

You could even mix that approach with the first one i wrote about: put the more popular tracks into the video file (again, for convenience) and leave the rest as separate audio files.

(i am not really a professional of torrenting, at least not yet; here i wrote what i think)

I 'm wondering if it makes sense to create two separate torrents for the same movie when there are too many audio tracks. I have a movie with 11 different language tracks - 10 of which being encoded with AAC 5.1 - 384 kb/s and 1 of them being encoded with AAC 7.1 512 kb/s. Each Audio track is about 400 MB - which makes it almost 5 GB of used storage space - just for audio. Now if someone wants to download the torrent and is only interested in 1 of these 11 tracks he would still need to download all the other ones wich not only delays the download a lot but also takes up alot of "useless" bandwidth. When splitting the torrent in 2 and creating one file containing 6 of the 11 tracks - and the other one containing the other tracks - something like this could be mitigated imo.

What are your opinions on this? Should I just put all of them into one file or no?