Currently doing some experiments on encoding using VBR options, and i must say i'm surprised. Took an episode of 224Mb to 58Mb (though the audio was untouched).

Originally this is to take 1080p video to 720p to have them match (they didn't have said resolution for some reason), and take up half the space.

It's hard to tell how much of the flaws i see are from a flawed input file and from the result of the encoding. But different levels to decide on.

Constant Rate Factor (CRF) is what i'm using right now. So...

0 - Lossless (or as close to it), used for compressing game images
20 - I've used, good encoding, slightly smaller than 264 encodings of CBR. My personal favorite setting.
25 - Looks overall good
28 - Default encoding for x265, looks overall good
30 - I tried this, don't see any major issues. Looking closely you can see flaws at edges but they don't stand out.
35 - Lots of artifacting at edges, movements, I'd say 'ghost aura' from items moving. I'd say good for low quality devices or smaller screens. If you had very limited space and wanted to carry a large series this might work too, but i wouldn't recommend it.
40 - Looks like low bitrate; like 50Kbit encoding used for early 90's video chat that Microsoft Netmeeting used. Very blocky, in low motion settings it might be useful, otherwise it seems unusable except when limited space is the only concern.
45 - Nearly reduces video to squares and triangles. Very terrible. Unusable.
50 - Same as 45, looks like a blurry mess like smeared with vasoline as well.

Err.. why this now, h265 has been around since a good while..
There is AV1 at this point (unless greedy companies will ruin its spread).

I've been encoding off and on before. I remember in 2014 or something i had issues watching RedVsBlue Season 5 videos because it was so bulky to decode so i had to re-encode it for the system to playback smoother using a simpler codec.

It seems i usually do Mpeg4 (264), not 265 (AVC). But seeing as my TV decodes/plays the video fine at 30fps (not 60fps, tried animusic interpolated with bad results).

Using Virtualdub and NeroBurner 6 i've more than once did 2-pass encoding and got great results. But that's more a VBR from a fixed data instead of crf, so you could ensure it fits on your CD/DVD when burning vs getting something a bit too big.

This is more to encourage a discussion on success or settings that turned out really well for you. Likes/dislikes, etc.

I see. H265 was pretty cool, but nowadays still too resource-heavy for recording, sadly.
So, OBS is yet using h264 via x264 or NVENC (the worse one for quality\size).

But I surely appreciate other people's results for encoding with h265.

By the way, AVC is h264 and HEVC is h265. And CRF is.. king.

Has been long time since I did any video encoding (CD & DVD era!).
At that time I went to the point of using CBR, VBR, 1Pass, 2Pass... is Virtualdub still a thing?

At that time, IMO the forums from Spain provided the best tips & methods to get nice quality video on small sizes (2hr DVD movies on 200mb, they called them "jilipelis") and a couple of websites also had very useful tools like calculators. The problem then was the long time required to get the final video...

Then the affordable usb hdd appeared, personal life changes and I stopped keeping informed about video encoding. A couple of years ago just for curiosity I tried some Android apps but did not get impressed/interested

Anyway, sorry to don't be useful to add meat to the discussion but wanted to say thank you rtcvb32 for posting this. I'll read the link later and if you have more info (forums, websites, program names) I'll certainly appreciate it :)

If I think again about the ancient codecs of that time.. mpeg1-2, wmv, real, qt, divx, xvid.. agh..
(EDIT:) Virtualdub hasn't been updated anymore, but I'm using Avidemux instead of it. It's good for simple lossless cutting.

If I remember well, lossless cutting only *if* was a video codec without keyframes, otherwise would need to cut from keyframe to keyframe -or- re-encode... the mpegs were keyframe less, but not divx & xvid
I never, ever, touched wmv, real & qt :)
The virtualdub filters would beautify results if wisely used (but added a bunch of extra time to the processing) like blur/smoothing pixelated contours.

If I'd take the duty again, I'd use x264 (I heard x265 is better but more demanding to decode and I'd target to Android tablet/stick to play the videos) and MKV container with the purpose of copying the whole DVD/BR thing to the final file (menus, chapters, audio tracks, extracted subs in text, camera angles, the extras)
Is there any efficient tool nowadays to achieve that? What about the players: Are they still a shame to understand the whole content (aka unified interpretation of the MKV container)?
Last time I checked BS.Player for Android was much better than the PC program...
And Power DVD became a fest of DRM, unwanted boutique features & crazy requirements but delivering poor performance...
But again, please be patient: This is the highly outdated me talking :)

Keyframes are generally whole image replacements and then the I-frames following were changes to said frames. You could cut from anywhere, but the next frame HAS to start at a keyframe. Some modes of keyframes would be say every second (30 frames) or if the bitrate goes too high (usually scene change). Not sure about Mpeg 1-2, i never had to really bother with partial cuts with them. Proprietary players turned me off so i never touched them either. Mhmm... I'll have to see if i can't recreate my one effect i did in 2005 which took the intro music video from 'No time to die' i think and made it a very interesting black and white pen-drawn effect. The water droplet reflections and electrical effects told me i got it right. The pen effect though assumes to work by finding edges and then drawing them to certain levels of thickness, which doesn't work so well with artifacting and flaws in video where almost everything has edges. While Mpeg4 and 265 are likely more processing to decode, there's tons of hardware with built-in decoders making that problem kinda go away. Pi's include Mpeg4 decoders, and i'm sure most tablets/phones do too. Hardware solutions tend to be 2000x faster than the software counterparts.

As for a tool to do everything, not sure myself. I've used basic menu generators before, otherwise i'd refer back to Nero6 to make my menus for DVD's. (Can't run the burner half in emulation but you can sure encode the video and make an ISO).

Ops, it seems I confused the software names.
I don't have Virtualdub anymore, I'm using Avidemux now (old name but it can use various codecs at this point).
The keyframe limitation and strict concatenation requirements are still true of course (sadly).

P.s: beware of changing containers, old ones don't support all the same things as new ones. Oh true, they were still great back then, compared to the absurd space required by lossless.
And Xvid was the best one frankly. But when h264 appeared, that one was really groundbreaking. Yeah same. Btw VLC was another game-changing software. And the fact that it was free was incredible.
Before it, one had to search and install codecs manually to even play videos. O_o
Packs started appearing too, but they were a bit of a mess.

Heh, you might like AVIsynth too. But that's another topic.

True not everything would transfer, like chapter information, multiple audio streams, etc... subtitle tracks. etc. I guess hope you don't need those before you start.

Well before those it was 263, a netmeeting conferencing codec. Mircrosoft had a bug in the bitrate setting; When that was fixed/removed you could do fairly decent video. But it was more or less a hack, and didn't last too long.

Heh, i usually went with the CCCP - Combined Community Codec Pack. It includes pretty much all codecs and a classic player that is more lightweight then VLC and faster. However when there's multiple audio streams VLC does a better job.

There's VirtualDub2 now.

I'll give it a try next time i need to use it.

I know Virtualdub had several versions, including MPEG versions that seemed to more natively read (but not write) MPEG type of files, seemingly gimmicks split between versions. So i'll be hopeful.

edit: First look and playing with it, it feels like a drop-in replacement and is familiar but with more features. Lots of codec options.

Been playing around more with H265, though with ffmpeg options it's difficult to get it to take more time to do a better job and get better compression (Virtualdub VFW x265 codec the slow profile would do a better job). But some games with videos CRF 20 seems sufficient, i can't see a difference.

But it seems there's another contender now as i've been working. VP9 (WebP/WebM). It looks like the codec does a marginally better on space, but encoding/decoding in bulk is a pain and slow. Then there's if it has hardware support for decoding vs Mpeg4. Which i'll investigate more later.


So I did increments of 5 of CRF and honestly it appears the CRF of VP9 is equal to half of that of H265. Not only that, even on the lowest quality i could push it (60) looked on par with 28 or so. Though new content from scrolling might suffer was a bit blurry otherwise and didn't go away til about 25 or under.

Though curiously if you don't specify a max bitrate (via -b:v), no matter how low you put the CRF it will turn out crappy. Though when the filesizes of said videos are compared, they are comparable but the VP9 version does look better, at least with this test video.

edit: hmm seems setting presets is easier than i expected, whenever i tried before it just barfed at me.

VP9 was Google's main encoder before AV1 happened.
I expect hw support for the latter, more than the for first one.