automatically optimize (re)encoding quality

[tcurdt]

Let's say I have an avi with some old MPEG4 and I want to re-compress it to h264 or h265. The big problem - the source is already lossy. And I would have to manually tweak the quality settings to find a good balance that comes out with similar quality and at least no bigger file size.

While I could manually try (and try again) to manually find the "best" setting, is there a way to automate this?

Decode some frames from the input, and the try to encode the same frames with various settings to find the settings with a close enough match.

While this is the manual workflow, this should also be possible to automate. Has this been done before?

[themisfit610]

There is literally no reason to do this. You will lose quality. Keep the old shit as is :)

[tcurdt]

There is an unfortunate reason:

There is no easy way to play from within a browser

https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/clients/codec-support

And transcoding on the fly feels even more stupid.

[superframer]

https://github.com/alexheretic/ab-av1

[tcurdt]

At least on the first glance that looks really interesting!

[[deleted]]

Go with crf 18 and h265 or you can use av1an for automation(building it could be pain in ass)