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!

  • @rotopenguinEnglish
    11•2 months ago

    I believe h.265 has particular handling for “film grain”. And it has hardware decoding on just about every chip out there. And you probably already have a hardware encoder, so you can do something like QSV in a reasonable time frame.

    300MB for a half-hour is a pretty reasonable bitrate, for one and a half hours it is quite dire.

    • @kevincox@lemmy.ml
      1•2 months ago

      I would avoid h265 if you prefer free (libre). The only real advantage it has over AV1 is that devices started shipping hardware decoding support a few years earlier. If you need that and care about file size/quality then yes, you may need to go h265. But otherwise I would lean towards AV1 (better quality) or h264 (basically 100% compatibility).