Arch Linux

Dreamkey

Member

Registered: 2010-08-28

Posts: 45

How to nicely compress a video?

Hello, I would like to compress a dashcam video to a reasonable size.
The original file takes around 450MB for only two minutes at 1080p, and already has compression artefacts on dark areas.

I followed FFmpeg guide for H265 to extract and compress 22 seconds into 10MB. It looks okay for a small clip, but I'm always wondering how I can find "HDlight" videos that only take 2GB for 2 hours will keeping a great quality.
Is it because movies have more stable shots? Should I try to stabilize the video?

PS: I also tried HandBrake, the quality is the same than using FFmpeg manually but it also fades the colours.

jonno2002

Member

Registered: 2016-11-21

Posts: 719

Re: How to nicely compress a video?

im not expert on encoding but ive done a bit in my time, your source quality probably isnt good enough to give the results your expecting, the videos youve seen were probably from a very crisp high quality source.
as for encoding ive only used h264 and found that the slower the encode setting the better the quality, pretty sure i normally use rf22 and slow or slower preset. it may take longer but the quality is better.
really you just have to try settings and see what happens.