[jackvalentine]

Assuming you’re using FFMPEG?

Do you have a good guide for balancing quality and size? I’ve searched but never found something that really nails it for me. I have until now just been keeping everything as it streamed off the dvd or bluray in mpeg4 or h264 in an mkv and yeah, time to re-encode in to something more reasonably sized.

[Our_Benefactors]

Yes, I wrote a python script that uses FFMPEG and detects the bitrate of the file and determines approximately what CQ to use. If the original file has a low bitrate, by reencoding it with a high CQ you can actually increase the file size (lol).

Normal CQ = 28 Aggressive CQ = 34

  # Thresholds to detect ultra-low-bitrate inputs (use more aggressive encoding)
  # (width, height) → min sensible bitrate (bps). If stream <= threshold, use aggressive profile.  

 LOW_BITRATE_THRESHOLDS = [
       ((3840, 2160),  13_000_000),  # 4K  ≤13 Mbps → use aggressive encoding
       ((2560, 1440),   8_000_000),  # 1440p
       ((1920, 1080),   5_000_000),  # 1080p
       ((1280, 720),    2_500_000),  # 720p
       ((854, 480),     1_200_000),  # 480p
   ]

[jackvalentine]

Thanks!