Post · bonfire.cafe

So I have hundreds of videos of ~1 minute recorded from my phone ~10 years ago, and they generally don’t have that great compression, nor they are stored in a modern and advanced video format.

For archiving purposes, I want to take advantage of my workstation’s mighty GPU to process them so that the quality is approximately the same, but the file size would be strongly reduced.

Nevertheless, compressing videos is terribly hard, and way more complex than compressing pictures, so I wouldn’t really know how to do this, what format to use, what codec, what bitrate, what parameters to keep an eye on, etc.

I don’t care if the compression takes a lot of time, I just want smaller but good looking videos.

Any tips? (Links to guides and tutorials are ok too)

Also, unfortunately I am forced to use Windows for this (don’t ask me why 🫠), but I know nothing about Windows because I hate it. Practical software suggestions are very much welcome, too!

#ffmpeg #help #askFedi #codec #AVI #H265 #H264 #movie #video #videoCompression #compression #encoding #HandBrake #heif #heic #avif #mp4 #mkv #Wondows

Florian Snow

@floriansnow@mastodon.social · 2 weeks ago

@tommi The very best solution is actually leaving the videos as is. Every re-encoding, no matter how good the encoder, will lose some quality. Storage is cheap, probably much cheaper than the power used for re-encoding and that way, you don't lose anything.

Paolo Redaelli

@paoloredaelli@mastodon.uno · 2 weeks ago

@tommi have you tried looking at #VLC? AFAIK it has some batching convertion facilities

Gratiskatze

@Gratiskatze@mastodon.social · 2 weeks ago

@tommi
as mentioned before. ffmpeg is the way to go. I did that recently with my collection, however I switched the audio codec to a lossy aac codec. But I needed too compile ffmpeg myself to use libfdk-acc. YMMV on windows. I remapped all important metadata in multiple automated steps. So not all with ffmpeg allone

nicolas ⁂

@nclm@mastodon.social · 2 weeks ago

@tommi What I’d do is to use Handbrake and make a series of tests on a sample of 2 or 3 videos that have different colours/movements. Trying out different compression levels and options, to find the one that offers the best middleground between file size and quality across these sample videos. Then save the preferred options as a preset and batch apply it on the 100s of videos.

Tommi 🤯

@tommi@pan.rent · 2 weeks ago

@nclm Thank you! I just have to solve the metadata preservation issue, now 🤔

nicolas ⁂

@nclm@mastodon.social · 2 weeks ago

@tommi Ah yes that’s a whole other thing good luck 😅

nicolas ⁂

@nclm@mastodon.social · 2 weeks ago

@tommi At least I don’t think there’s a one way fits all, so making some manual tests and observing the level of compression with your own eyes on the actual videos you want, so you can judge how much loss of quality if too much for you.

Eugenus Optimus 🇺🇦

@ujeenator@social.ujeenator.net · 2 weeks ago

@tommi if you don't want to spend money for large products like Adobe Media Encoder, I suggest you to invest some time to learn ffmpeg command line tool, it can encode pretty anything and process thousands of files in background if properly configured with script.

You don't need to learn it perfectly, actually you can use LLM so it will help you to properly configure parameters.

Also feel free to ask me.

Phil Betts

@philbetts@mastodon.social · 2 weeks ago

@ujeenator @tommi Handbrake is pretty much the go-to GUI app for re-encoding, and it's pretty much just FFMPEG under the hood (most video software is pretty much just FFMPEG under the hood I think.)

Eugenus Optimus 🇺🇦

@ujeenator@social.ujeenator.net · 2 weeks ago

@tommi for the most advanced video compression you can use AV1 codec, but keep in mind that all of your devices should support it, it also means that it will be hard to watch it on old devices.

The most common choice is H.256, it may be less efficient than AVIF, but it widely supported on most of devices.

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