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!

  • meteokr@community.adiquaints.moe
    8·
    2 months ago

    I’m reasonably sure that AV1 has better or at least similar size ratios. They also explicitly mentioned wanting to use libre codecs, which h265 is not.

    • LeFantome@programming.dev
      2·
      2 months ago

      You can be more than reasonably sure that AV1 compresses better than H.265. With AV1 you can use Opus for audio and that is going to absolutely destroy whatever your pairing with H.265.

      At the video resolutions we are talking about here, the audio is going to be a big chunk of the H.265 file. Opus will make a huge difference.