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!

  • just_another_person@lemmy.world
    3·
    2 months ago

    Well pretty much every DVD maxes at 480p for storage constraint purposes, so that might be your first issue. Ripping and encoding at a higher resolution than the source nets you nothing but wasted space.

    That being said, HEVC is going to be the smallest file size for your rips, with reasonable encoding times and compatibility mostly not an issue.

    AV1 is new-ish, so depending on your hardware, could take anywhere from 5x-10x longer, and only net you an average of 15% difference in size reduction, and then you have compatibility to worry about.