What settings should I use for good quality 720p compression. I have most of my movie collection on my external. want to cleam up some space. right now the are .VOB I want to compress them down without losing much quality. If that is possible. right now they are 5 to 7 gigs a piece
I ripped all my blurays to .mkv files and compressed them using HEVC/h.265. H.265 can compress the video down without loosing quality pretty well but the audio settings can really impact the overall file size. You should be able to get a full length movie down to a couple gigs without loosing any video quality with one audio track. I usually encode several audio tracks including a DTS-HD pass through which is basically uncompressed from the original source.
Well, the big questions are probably how long are you willing to wait for render and how picky are you about quality?
HEVC/H.265 is very cpu intensive but I don't think you are going to see much benefit unless you are really keen to get file sizes very small. For 1920x1080 and below H.265 see's very significant benefits once you drop the data rate to 2000k or lower, larger than that and it's not such a big deal. This is my opinion based on experience and corroboration with peers. More than likely the render times will put you off using it anyway, especially if you have a lot to do.
It's very hard to say what settings work best without knowing what sort of file size you hope to achieve. And also without knowing the quality of the source material or having seen it..
But on the assumption that you are using full HD files; for 1280x720 I would suggest you use...
- H.264 with a 2500kbps data rate with 2-pass encoding.
- Set the profile to 'High' and the preset to at least 'medium', preferably 'slow'. Keep the filters (decomb etc) off, but again hard to say what you would really need here.
- You can use MKV or MP4 doesn't really matter, keep in mind some mobile devices seem to get upset with MKV. Either way you can probably change the extension later and it will still work.
- Regarding Audio i would keep this to the same data rate as the source file. Sound is half the experience and i don't personally consider sacrifices here worth it.
This should give you a good place to start from, I suggest you start here and tweak to preference. You can most likely drop the data rate to 2000kbps and wouldn't see much difference. If you want to use HEVC/H.265 you can achieve the same quality (2500k) with about 1200kbps. Once more thing if you are working with any SD files from a DVD or other don't increase the resolution to 1280x720 and don't mess with the pixel aspect ratio, just keep it Strict.
I am using lossless rips from DVD.
I have tried in the past using handbrake but it would make them blocky (if that is a word.) noticable quality difference. I was using my 860k and it seem like it took forever with high quality compression. So I used the fast settings =). I now have 6700k so I wanted to try again. since I spend 8 hours a day in front of my computer working. I figured I could reduce the file size of my External Hdd =).
My ideal size would be around 1Gig
Try to stick with CRF values instead of CBR/2-pass RC. That lets the codec decide what settings to use instead of trying to eyeball it. For near transparent encodes I usually use AVC @ CRF=18, or HEVC @ CRF=17. For anything that I do not care about the quality much, I do CRF=20. Try not to go below 16 or above 23.
Unless you are using a GPU accelerated encoder (including Intel QuickSync), I would recommend H264/AVC over H265/HEVC just so you are not waiting a day or two per movie.
DVD resolution is 720x480 or 480p so if you are trying to encode a DVD rip at 1280x720 it will probably always look bad. You are not going to get any better quality than the source file. You should be able to get those below 1 gig easily using h.264. I use h.265 since I use a secondary system with an old i7 3770k running Linux for video encoding so it can chug away all day on 1080p files if I want it too, plus I have a few newer devices that already support h.265 hardware decoding. I also use plex media server so it can transcode the videos to whatever format on the fly for different devices.
just used the CRF 20 medium everything else is default. picture has a thin greenish line at the bottom is that natural? oh and h.264 profile set to HIgh
This. Messing with the resolution or pixel aspect ratio is always something I try to avoid.
I've encoded DVD films at 1Mbps with h.265 and the quality is very good. File sizes typically work out to under a 1Gig
Doesn't sound natural. If it's a consistent, solid green line across the whole of the frame it can probably just be cropped out and may be something that was left over from your lossless capture. If it is a green haze over the actual picture that's another matter and something has gone awry..
It was VLC player. Used another player and its not there.
Ive tried the settings you guys have been kind enough to offer. with Time to quality I found 16 with a slow and profile to High is pefect.
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yes, as you said you can compress videos in batch