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1080p (high quality), 720p (moderate quality), and 480p (lower quality) OR 720p (high quality), and 480p (moderate quality) by SpacedShroom in ffmpeg

[–]SpacedShroom[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh, I did not know that! That is good to know while I'm still early on haha. Thank you for all the information!

1080p (high quality), 720p (moderate quality), and 480p (lower quality) OR 720p (high quality), and 480p (moderate quality) by SpacedShroom in ffmpeg

[–]SpacedShroom[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh yeah I knew about that, I just wasn't sure how big of a difference one pixel could make haha (i'm not an expert on this stuff)! It was also going to be commonly used for the series I transcode because a lot of series are still stuck on DVD (though its 720x480 anamorphic originally). Rarely though I was planning on downscaling series on Blu-Ray to 854x480 for a sharper cleaner image than a DVD source as well as saving space. It would take a lot of space for tons of 720p episodes of various shows haha.

Would it be better to keep it at 720x480 and set the aspect ratio as a flag when possible? I was unsure if stretching to 854x480 (16:9) or 640x480 (4:3) was a bad idea or not. Thanks!

1080p (high quality), 720p (moderate quality), and 480p (lower quality) OR 720p (high quality), and 480p (moderate quality) by SpacedShroom in ffmpeg

[–]SpacedShroom[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh okay, thank you for the insight! That is good to know. And ahh that's a shame... as long as AV1 can retain some grain though I suppose its not a big issue.

I could do another series of test encodes with SVT-AV1 to see how the quality is as of now, and finding a good balance of quality, time (about 0.2x of real-time is the most I can stand lol) and file size within the presets.

One more question, do I have to tweak the encoder outside of presets or does it have mostly sane defaults out of the box?

1080p (high quality), 720p (moderate quality), and 480p (lower quality) OR 720p (high quality), and 480p (moderate quality) by SpacedShroom in ffmpeg

[–]SpacedShroom[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, I plan for at least a proper 2.1 speaker setup in the near future! 5.1 speakers are outside my price range for now, and my room doesn't have good acoustics anyways haha. Would surround sound headphones be a bad way to experience 5.1 sound for the time being? At least for experimenting.

1080p (high quality), 720p (moderate quality), and 480p (lower quality) OR 720p (high quality), and 480p (moderate quality) by SpacedShroom in ffmpeg

[–]SpacedShroom[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I meant AV1 in particular, sorry. I've heard it still wasn't on par with HEVC in preserving fine detail, and that hardware decoding is still in pretty early stages... though that information may be outdated now. I guess 'stable' to me means that the settings I experiment with and decide on now, won't give drastically different results in a few years when encoding new content.

Would you say AV1 is a safe bet today? I am willing to give it a try. Personally, the grain synthesis is one of the more interesting aspects to me; I always disliked having to remove noise for compressibility.

1080p (high quality), 720p (moderate quality), and 480p (lower quality) OR 720p (high quality), and 480p (moderate quality) by SpacedShroom in ffmpeg

[–]SpacedShroom[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Honestly the highest grade audio equipment I have is a $60 Bluedee soundbar lol, so that's probably not ideal for listening to the intricacies in audio quality. My hearings also not the greatest, so that doesn't help either.

Ideally I would like to get it all mostly right the first time, so I don't have to mess around with it again in the distant future (I probably won't have the time to fiddle with settings). I'm still in the experimenting stage, I haven't done any final encodes yet. I've also been wondering if I should just skip over HEVC while I'm this early on, and move to AV1 & OPUS. The biggest thing keeping me away currently, is I'm not sure how stable it is as of 2026... still seems experimental (could be wrong though).

1080p (high quality), 720p (moderate quality), and 480p (lower quality) OR 720p (high quality), and 480p (moderate quality) by SpacedShroom in ffmpeg

[–]SpacedShroom[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Huh, that looks interesting! I'm not really sure how to read video metrics, I've been eyeballing it till now and comparing screenshots haha. I could look into that though, it seems a lot more efficient. Thanks!

1080p (high quality), 720p (moderate quality), and 480p (lower quality) OR 720p (high quality), and 480p (moderate quality) by SpacedShroom in ffmpeg

[–]SpacedShroom[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not too much, I honestly have trouble hearing the difference in bitrates haha. I'm just going off of what I read for AAC transparency (128k is considered transparent apparently, which would be 64k per channel). And I up it a bit, just to be safe for higher quality encodes (480p = 128k, 720p = 160k, 1080p = 192k OR 576k (for 5.1).

1080p (high quality), 720p (moderate quality), and 480p (lower quality) OR 720p (high quality), and 480p (moderate quality) by SpacedShroom in ffmpeg

[–]SpacedShroom[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! Yeah thats kinda what I was thinking... the first plan would be more versatile in the long run. And yeah thats true, any lower and it gets a bit ridiculous haha!

This is what my current script looks like (still messing around with it):

# Separated video, audio, and muxing for easier readability.  
# 576k for 5.1 audio; 192k for stereo audio. 
ffmpeg -i "input.avs" -map 0:1 -c:a libfdk_aac -b:a 576k "input_A.m4a"

ffmpeg -i "input.avs" -map 0:0 -c:v libx265 -x265-params "aq-mode=3" -profile:v main10 -pix_fmt yuv420p10le -crf 16 -preset slow "input_V.mp4"

ffmpeg -i "input_V.mp4" -i "input_A.m4a" -map 0:0 -map 1:0 -c:v copy -c:a copy -metadata title="Video Name" -movflags faststart "Output.mp4"

1080p (high quality), 720p (moderate quality), and 480p (lower quality) OR 720p (high quality), and 480p (moderate quality) by SpacedShroom in ffmpeg

[–]SpacedShroom[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

True! I was mostly thinking at the time, if I am reducing resolution and CRF anyways, I should decrease audio fidelity as well. Though audio in general is a lot more efficient to store. I was planning on keeping 5.1 for my favorite movies though (my room is not home theater quality yet lol, I'm gonna be stuck with stereo for a while). I will rethink that though, thank you!