Recommendations for 1080p videos for multiple platforms

[jeffm]

Hi folks, I'm a new user of HandBrake and video transcoding in general, but I have been doing a lot of research to try and get up to speed as quickly as possible. I'm hoping one of you seasoned experts could offer some advice or direction.

I am trying to take a large and ever-growing pool of software product demonstration videos and shrink them down to the smallest size possible without impacting quality while also maintaining support for multiple platforms (Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android). We've settled on h.264/MP4 and I'm using the Baseline 3.0 profile when transcoding them along with AAC/128kbit for audio. I started with the Universal device preset and then made these changes:

- x264 present moved to Very Slow
- Constant Quality changed to 26 RF
- Again audio at AAC/128kbit

The videos are being produced by a number of people and so far the settings they used have been inconsistent. In general we asked for recordings to be at 1080p, but the resolution has varied. The goal is for the videos to play well on all the platforms (Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android), assuming they are relatively current. For Windows that means Windows 7 or higher, Mac OSX 10.9+, iOS 9+, and Android 5.0+.

I have found the settings I used to produce reasonably small videos but I'm not sure if there are other options I could leverage to further reduce the size. Any ideas experts?

Thank you!

[rollin_eng]

Could you please post your logs, instructions can be found here:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=31236

[JohnAStebbins]

There's not a lot you can do with video encoder settings without knowing something about the characteristics of the video. i.e. you can get smaller or higher quality encodes of animation by enabling the animation tune. But the animation tune will result in larger or lower quality encodes for live action. So if you have a variety of video sources, there isn't really a magic bullet that will help universally. The encoder presets give generally smaller or higher quality as you go to slower presets, but in my experience, the difference from one preset to the next is extremely small. I always stick to medium because the slower presets just don't make that big a difference.


Have you experimented with different audio bitrates? 128kb is fairly high. Depending on the expected playback environment, you might be able remix down to mono and go as low as 32 to 56kb.

How clean are your source videos? If there is much noise, you can get smaller files by applying a denoise filter. NLMeans is very good but very slow.

Are all your video sources progressive? If not, or you don't have control over that (i.e. some could be interlaced), you should enable the decomb filter. The decomb filter will automatically detect interlaced frames and only deinterlace those detected frames.

[jeffm]

Here are logs for three different conversions:

Sample1: http://pastebin.com/RNuGWi8V
Sample2: http://pastebin.com/5wb60K99
Sample3: http://pastebin.com/Y4D7TPjC

These were created by 3 different people so the original videos were made using different settings.

John - thank you for the info on other settings to try. I have a window of time today and will play around with the settings you mentioned and see what the results are. I imagine there may not be an ideal set of settings given that videos are recorded by different people with different configurations.

[jeffm]

So just to report back...

- Lowering audio quality to 64kb did result in about a 10% size reduction
- Denoise filter set to ultralight resulted in minimally smaller files (less than 1% reduction)
- Animation tuning resulted in larger file sizes
- Decomb filter set to default did not reduce file size

There are still other things to try I'm sure, but I'm guessing that I'm already getting a huge savings from lowering the constant quality to 26RF and dropping audio bitrate to 128kb.

Would there be any benefit to switching from the Baseline profile to Main or High? Most devices I need to support are modern, and really it was Android that was causing me to use Baseline 3.0. If I were to assume no Android devices below 5.0 would be supported as well as iOS 10 on Apple devices does that help?

Sorry for all the questions... I'm learning but still new to this all.

[rollin_eng]

Your sources all already have AAC audio so you could select AAC passthrough for your audio as HB's encoder is not the best.

[Deleted User 13735]

High Profile is designed to be more efficient than main or baseline, meaning the same quality at lower file size.

However, RF encoding in Handbrake may negate, or even reverse the expected outcome.
Experiment.

[jeffm]

Thanks for the feedback rollin_eng and musicvid. I'll try with AAC passthrough and will also go back and play around with the High profile. Learning more every day about this tool and the whole encoding process.

Again I appreciate the info!