Thank you, that was very informative!

The settings depends on what I’m doing. If I’m trying to squeeze a lot of video to a small space, I’ll crank up crf. For good quality I was using crf 40 or so. If something is already encoded, simply transcoding will be lossy and be blurrier if you side-by-side them, so for archiving I decided to just always keep the source, even if it’s raw DVD or other wasteful codec. But for making clips and things out of it, I’m trying to use the best thing, that doesn’t waste a lot of space, and is playable by most people. It was awhile ago that I compared encoders, but I settled on using libsvtav1. librav1e seemed to have even less options, and it didn’t seem better, but maybe there is a way to tune it better. What killed it for me was when I had an artifact in an AV1 video that I noticed, and when I encoded the same video with h265 and with same bitrate, it did not have that problem. Eventually one of my subscribers complained they couldn’t view my h265 videos on their phone, so I switched to vp9 for more compatibility, and without having to stoop back to the least common denominator codec that is h264. So now even if I figure out the best encoder library and settings, I can’t use it right now because of compatibility, I’m not just making videos for me to look at. I’ll probably try pushing for AV1 again soon just to see, because it’s inevitable that it will be supported everywhere. I’m sad to hear people saying GPU encoding can’t be better, I hoped there would be an option to make it take longer but do good job at really great quality per byte. I still dont have a GPU that can do AV1 encoding, and I can’t find any articles that show comparisons on the quality of the output, it’s always just about how fast it encodes.

I haven’t found a good encoder, I used all the ones with ffmpeg, such as libsvtav1 and librav1e, but the results are not as good. I screenshot the frame from the original and the transcoded file, then compare that with h265 and the av1 version has noticeable artifacts, like an object will move across the sky, and it will leave a few pixels behind sometimes. I just assume that the problem is with the encoder, and if I can get a hold of a GPU that does encoding, then I can finally start using it. Until then, I’m using vp9 for the short clips I publish, since that works on Discord and Telegram. Now if only Mastodon would support literally anything except h264/aac then I wouldn’t have to add a h264 version to the pipeline for everything.