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Handbrake/ffmpeg: What free video codec to use for 720p videos? (slrpnk.net)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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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!

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[–] 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

My short opinion:

Video

h264 is the best option for compatibility. There have been free software encoders and decoders forever and IIRC all patents have expired. Basically every device you will encounter and every software system can play h264 videos and the encoders are fairly good.

AV1 is the best option for quality. It is completely free and is becoming widely supported. It will likely be supported for a long time as it is the first widely available high quality free codec. It is significantly better quality than h264 so will result in smaller files for the same quality or better quality for the same file size. Hardware decoding support has only really become common in devices that hit the market in the last few years. But most new devices will have hardware decoding.

Both of these are web-compatible as well which is nice.

Audio

Opus for lossy and FLAC for lossless are both some of the best codecs in their class, completely free and widely available. There are also both web-compatible.

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