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!

  • UnfortunateShort
    8•7 months ago

    I encode everything with AV1 and Opus, although, as others have pointed out, there is the disadvantage that older (as in “not new”) devices won’t have hardware acceleration for those. I don’t care about that tho, because 1080p runs just fine on decent CPUs and I want to encode for the future, not yesteryear.

    For AV1 I use 10bit, VFR, RF25. If you want, you can play around with the performance profile to trade file size for encoding speed.

    For Opus I use 320 kbit/s fixed Bitrate and 7.1 downmix. Note that when dealing with audio and subtitles, you absolutely should include tracks of ‘unknown’ language! Otherwise they are just thrown away. And of course you should include every other language you care about. You can also choose to pass through Opus encoded tracks automatically.

    I prefer MKV as container format, because from all I hear it’s flexible and robust. Pretty much everything else is set to default. I’d advise to safe your settings to a preset and to briefly verify encoded videos actually work and contain the desired tracks.