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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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[–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

I would try to avoid VP9. Hardware support is spotty and I suspect that new hardware is going to relatively quickly phase it out. AV1 is better in most circumstances except for a few devices that have hardware VP9 support but not AV1 (a few years of Android phones mostly). So unless you need a specific device you currently own to have hardware decoding support (only really matters if you are on battery for <=1080p content) just skip VP8.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    VP9 has pretty wide support, probably due to the Google (and YouTube) backing. I sincerely doubt devices will phase out any codecs, especially not VP9.

    AMD video cards have supported hardware decoding of VP9 since vcn1.0 - well before they had support for decoding AV1

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