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!

  • @leopoldEnglish
    20•1 month ago

    VP9 is AV1’s predecessor and VP8 is VP9’s predecessor. Dunno what the “264K 360° Surround sound 3D VR” thing is about, but AV1 is a good general purpose video codec and I recommend using it, with Opus audio.

    EDIT: I should add, h264 and h265 are non-free because of software patents, for which there are licensing fees. There are free implementations and there always have been, but the extent to which these implementations can actually freely be used legally is limited by this. Cisco’s OpenH264 is an exception, because there is a cap to the licensing fee and Cisco is already paying the max amount. This allows them to freely distribute binaries for their h264 implementation without having to pay additional licensing fees for every user. It’s a clever loophole, but there are still limitations, namely that you have to be using Cisco’s pre-built binaries. If you want to use the source code, you still need to pay for the licensing fee.

    Because patents last twenty years and the initial release of h264 was made in August 2004, the key h264 patents should all expire within the next few years, which will eliminate the problem. h265 however was introduced in 2013 and its patents still have a good decade left in them.