Shrink an MKV

[exoticdisease]

I have recently acquired Lord of The Rings MKV 720p at 8.4gb. This is too big, I'd like to bring it down to a more manageable 3gb (roughly). Does anyone know a way of doing that?

Cheers

[Baldrick]

uncropmkv.

[exoticdisease]

Does that shrink the image size? I'd like to leave it at 1280x720 or whatever the original is...

[Baldrick]

Just change the bitrate to lower the file size. Keep everything else same. Use a bitrate calculor to calculate the output file size like videocalc.

Or use handbrake. Load mkv, under the video tab change the output file size. Convert. Done.

[exoticdisease]

You beautiful man! I'll try that later on (after work lol). Thanks very much

[guns1inger]

LOTR is a big film. Dropping the bitrate by over 50% (which you will have to do to get the size down that much) is going to noticeably reduce the quality. Personally, I would use TSMuxer to cut the film into two (or better yet, go and buy the real bluray edition, rather than downloading a much reduced version and then butchering it).

[exoticdisease]

So what size would you recommend for a 720p MKV of reasonable quality? Surely 8gb is huge? How many gb per hour should I be looking at? Or what bitrate?

[guns1inger]

I would not go below 2 GB per hour at 720p, and even that is low. The size you have is about the minimum size it should be.

[exoticdisease]

bitrate?

[guns1inger]

variable. Encode for quality levels and let the bitrate fall where it needs to.

[exoticdisease]

and the program will automatically adjust for quality levels based on the type of image being shown on screen at the time? e.g. more complex images require a higher bitrate to keep a certian quality?

[guns1inger]

That is how it works, and how your MKV was encoded in the first place. You can only make is smaller is the ask for a lower quality