I have a lot of old movies, most will barely be 720p.

I ripped them off DVDs with MakeMKV and have sometimes 7GB files for 1,5h.

I want to convert them to something below 300MB, I often see more modern torrented movies below that size, so this should totally be possible.

They will only ever be played with VLC (Windows) or Celluloid/MPV (Linux) with hardware decoding.

But what codec to use? h264 and h265 are nonfree, arent they? But Videolan has some free variant of it and Cisco also offers their free version for h264?

Never heard of VP8 and VP9. Then there is AV1 but that seems to only have “264K 360° Surround sound 3D VR” options.

Man I just want to encode normal movies 🥲

What about webm? That is under “web” but probably also good?

I suppose I should use h264 for compatibility, but the web stuff will also be compatible. I would like the best and fanciest algorithms to have least dataloss.

Also, what to use for the audio? I think opus is best.

Thanks!

  • TheAnonymouseJoker
    1·
    22 days ago

    Are you going to be a legal commercial distributor of these videos? No? Use x265.

    Useful x265 settings:

    • CRF 21 Slow or 23 Very Fast, depending on the quality you need. (Do not choose presets other than slow, medium or very fast, all others are waste.)
    • Encoder level 4.0 or above, usually auto might take care but sometimes banding issues may remain if not set manually
    • Command line options - aq-mode=3:aq_strength=1.1
    • If video is 10-bit or 12-bit, do not go with x265 8bit video encoder. Use MediaInfo to check this for your videos. This also solves banding and chromatic aberration issues.

    AV1 is about 10x slower to encode, and you will save roughly 2-3% more space than x265 which is a stupid tradeoff for time wastage.

    Audio: never compress the audio stream of a video. Passthrough should be used.

    Also, I find Windows much more reliable than Linux when using Handbrake for long batch video conversion queues. The cutree keeps fattening but conversion will not abruptly stop or crash in second passes.