Shrink H.264 Without Re-Encoding?

General questions or discussion about HandBrake, Video and/or audio transcoding, trends etc.
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Maddux
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Joined: Mon Feb 26, 2007 9:29 am

Shrink H.264 Without Re-Encoding?

Post by Maddux »

I have been encoding all my DVD's to best match DVD resolution and quality, which will, of course, not play on my iPod. Whenever I do want to watch something on my iPod I run it through iSquint, which re-encodes it (albeit relatively quickly). The thing is, since my videos are already in H.264, is there any program I can use to maybe cut the resolution in half without re-encoding, or is this just a fantasy? I'm encoding to a high bitrate, so will that be an issue? Can I reduce that too?

Thanks for any help, sorry if I'm just grasping at straws here.
deckeda
Enlightened
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Joined: Thu Feb 22, 2007 8:38 am

Post by deckeda »

I wonder if ffmpegX would do what you want. http://ffmpegX.com

On the "video" tab you can un-check "Encode video" but the pixel dimension boxes are still available. Perhaps that's the equivalent of only cropping the image ...

But wait, you need to lower the bitrate as well? Um ...

Here's a question: even with lower resolution, lower bitrate, lower picture quality --- are you going to notice on an iPod's screen? Or is this mainly an academic exercise?
rhester
Veteran User
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Joined: Tue Apr 18, 2006 10:24 pm

Post by rhester »

I can make this easy. No, you can't. Not with any tool.

Rodney
thanar
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Joined: Fri Feb 09, 2007 11:16 am

Post by thanar »

You COULD (if there was such an application) crop, rotate, flip, inverse and so on an H.264 video without reencoding, but NOT scale it. It's just the way xpegs work.
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