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!

  • @LoETR9
    2•1 month ago

    I usually go for VP9 and opus in a webm container. This is widely supported, because it is Google sponsored, used on YouTube and supported by all browsers. As other people told you here, DVD are not 720p, they are 480 or 576 interlaced or progressive. You can find more details on Wikipedia.

    AV1 is the best compressing standard for video, but it is slower in encoding than HEVC (usually). VP9 is the predecessor, which is compresses better than AVC and comes close to HEVC. Speed wise is comparable to x265.

    Opus is the best audio standard, the only reason you may want to avoid it is for incompatibilities with older hardware players (in car radios, BluRay players,…).