I posted this on Reddit, but no one answered and I don't know where else to ask. I'll try explaining as best as I can.
I started using Handbrake for a school project and ended up using it constantly for video conversion. Still I have a lot of questions and searching on internet I didn't quite got the answers.
I have some GBs of old VGA (480p @ 23,97 FPS) animations which I downloaded a lot time ago and I want to encode them in a better way without quality loss, and store them somewhere. The original encoder used mpeg-4 XVID for video with 384 kbps AC3 audio (.avi) for a DVD rip. I guess that's what he had at hand at that moment. The files have around 262 MB for 23 minutes and the quality is somehow ok, for a VGA resolution. There are hard coded subtitles into the image so I can't do nothing about them.
Now, my aim is to preserve the quality by all means (which is already not great from the original encode) while getting a file as small as possible. I plan to use H265 because it gets generalized across most devices right now.
I tried those configs for the same file to try to establish the final settings:
[having tried a lot encodes I didn't include here a paste-bit of any activity logs because there would be too many lines. If they are really necesary I'll try to update the post or add in the comments]
- AVC H264, constant quality 22, same as source and constant FPS, fast encoder preset, denoise-nlmeans-light, aac 256 bit stereo ==> 143 MB size
HEVC H265, constant quality 22, same as source and variable FPS, fast encoder preset, denoise-nlmeans-light, aac 256 bit stereo ==> 109 MB size
HEVC H265, constant quality 22, same as source and variable FPS, fast encoder preset, no filter, aac 256 bit stereo ==> 116 MB size
HEVC H265, constant quality 22, same as source and variable FPS, fast encoder preset, no filter, aac 384 bit stereo ==> 137-143 MB size (2 encodings)
HEVC H265, constant quality 22, same as source and variable FPS, v.slow encoder preset, no filter, aac 384 bit stereo ==> 146 MB size
HEVC H265, constant quality 20, same as source and variable FPS, v.slow encoder preset, no filter, aac 384 bit stereo ==> 174 MB size
HEVC H265, constant quality 20, same as source and variable FPS, fast encoder preset, no filter, aac 384 bit stereo ==> 160 MB size
HEVC H265, constant quality 20, same as source and variable FPS, fast encoder preset, denoise-nlmeans-light, aac 384 bit stereo ==> 148 MB size
1) I don't seem to detect any quality change with denoise filter, changing the quality variable or changing the encoder speed preset but maybe I don't know where to look for it. Same for audio bitrate changes. Is there a way / tool I can measure the quality change? I don't want to loose any more quality because the original file is already not very qualitative.
2) I aim to have the best quality - similar to the original - in around 100-150 MB files. What settings do you suggest to use (audio and video), so that I can have a best ratio between quality and file size for these kind of files. based on my experiments what I have in mind right now is:
HEVC H265 (for sure), constant quality (not so sure), same as source and variable FPS (for sure), encoder preset (not so sure), denoise-nlmeans-very-light (not sure), aac 192 bit stereo (considering what an 128 kb Mp3 can achive, I think on going down to 160 kb).
Reffer to question 1)
3) I'm not really sure why, but changing the encoding speed results in a change in file size aswell. Is that normal? I don't really mind about conversion speed if i gain quality, but a higher file size is something that I'm concerned about.
4) Is there a risk, improvement or loss if I change the H265 8-bit encode mode to 10-bit? Will I gain / loose something in my case?
5) In file properties, the converted files are showing strange metadata like 64 kb audio (when I used 256 or 384 kb setting), 0 kb data rate and other things. Why is this happenening and how can I see the actual real data? The metadata of the original file is showing correctly... 1205 kb data rate, 384 kb audio, 1589 kb total data.
I'll add something here if it gets to my mind.
Thanks a lot for the help.