x264/x265 Most efficient settings for Screen recording

[Prototype v1.0]

Hi.

I pretty often does screen captures of complex applications (office, websites, various technical applications etc but not gaming) for learning purposes.

Normally, I use Avidemux to trim and encode the videos. And most of the times, a couple of minutes of recording may take less than 4MB of space - that is very good compression.

Since the video mostly consists of still pictures where small parts are moving/changing I'm thinking - is there certain settings that may further increase compression ratio or retaining sharpness (small characters/icons) specific for this kind of source video ?

[poisondeathray]

For x265 --tskip
https://x265.readthedocs.io/en/default/lossless.html#transform-skip

Also , longer GOP intervals (but this adversely affects seeking), more b-frames

If there are sections with no difference at all (no movement, static sequences), then VFR can help


Quality wise for sharpness of small icons, chroma subsampling can make a difference. YUV444 will be more clear than YUV420, but YUV444 will not be supported by as many scenarios (e.g. if you share on youtube, it will be converted to 420 anyways)