handbrake help or other way to shrink video size freeware

[Sharc]

@cholla: As I wrote in post#4 halving the bitrate of the video does not halve the filesize when one still keeps the audio, subtitles and the overhead intact.

[cholla]

@cholla: As I wrote in post#4 halving the bitrate of the video does not halve the filesize when one still keeps the audio, subtitles and the overhead intact.

I read post # 4 but I already knew that.
I did not know what Audio track videohelplover was working with.
The video clip I made & used had a small acc audio track so -c:a copy worked fine.
If the audio track was large obviously it would also require compression & maybe a format change.

The main reason I used -c:a copy .

I want the same audio quality but the lines can be blurry a bit and vhs quality is ok

Usually the subtitles and the overhead are small in size so only make a small difference.

With the "500 mb" (& it probably was not exactly that size) videohelplover started with i assume the audio track was also small.
Unless I'm wrong the "250 mb" was also an approximate size wanted.

I plan to see what Handbrake will do but I like ffmpeg cli & use it a lot.
So it was what I started with.

My standalone BD player USB input did not have good audio sync with these conversions & would not play the AV1's.

On the PC VLC, DVDFab media player, & Zoom Player played the videos in sync.
MPC-BE & MPC-HC both with LAV filters played with bad sync.

I also tried librav1e for the AV1 but I did not like the results.

[davexnet]

If you want an exact size, Vidcoder is probably the simplest to use. You tell it what size you want and it hits it pretty well

[cholla]

@ davexnet,
I gave Vidcoder a try.
I had to use version 2.63 from 2018. This is the last version that will work with Windows 7 32-bit.
It did hit the target size pretty close.
I had to pick 3 MB because VidCoder would not accept a decimal after the whole number.
Close to the size I got with the ffmpeg encodes I got when not using AV1

I did not like the result of using Handbrake by itself.

[davexnet]

Hi @cholla, I forgot you had an older system (I do too, but I have a 64 bit processor with Windows 10)
It's great that you got it to work. For me, that's one of the biggest benefits of VidCoder.
Perhaps the OP will be able to make use of it

[videohelplover]

Try AV1 encoding. I compressed a 500+ MB MP4 video of a cable car ride down to just a few dozen MB. I only changed the video encoder to AV1 in the video tab and kept the other settings at their defaults.

hi I tried in handbrake with constant quality 42 and 12 frames per second and av1 is almost double as h265! Would you know why? according to Ai and what your post suggest it should be the other way around.

[Alwyn]

and av1 is almost double as h265!

I found the same. Remember though that bitrate cannot be used to compare quality across codecs; it's what it looks like that counts, and you may well find that an AV1 of 2/3 the bitrate of an H265 file might be similar.

Hence my suggestion of using bitrates, as it appears that a particular CRF value is not the same image quality across the various codecs, although I stand to be corrected on that. If you're comfortable with using AV1 (and assuming, of course, that it is the most efficient codec; I don't know if it is), keep lowering the bitrate or increasing the CRF until you get to the point of unacceptable quality loss.