Converting Time Lapse JPEGs into a movie. Encoding?

[Zippy1970]

I have a webcam pointed at the street in front of my house which is taking one picture (JPG) every second. The resolution of the image is 1280x720 and each image is about 190K in size.

I use VirtualDubMod to convert about one day's worth of these images to a video. I use FFDShow as the encoder to convert it to H.264 set at an average bitrate of 600kbps.

The resulting file however, is around 600MB (for about 45 minutes of video @29.9fps). For a video where the image hardly changes between frames (the camera doesn't move and all that moves is some traffic and pedestrians now and then) and that doesn't contain audio (audio has been disabled in VirtualDubMod) I find 600MB pretty big. But if I set the average bitrate lower, the quality of the video drops unacceptably..

Now I'm no expert encoding videos by any means. My choice for H.264 and its bitrate settings are really chosen arbitrarily.

So I'm respectfully asking your help.

What would be the best codec to use for encoding a video like this (not much movement/change between frames and no audio)? How do I go about finding the correct settings for this codec? Any other tips you can give me?

[Zippy1970]

Nobody?

I'm still ending up with huge files and really don't want to have to delete older time lapse movies just to regain some diskspace...

[Baldrick]

How big does it get if you try choose constant quality/quantizer h264 encoding?

BUt I don't think you can reduce it that much if you want to keep it as 29.9fps...

[jagabo]

Audio? Your file size sounds about right for 45 minutes of 600 kbps video and stereo uncompressed PCM.

[poisondeathray]

Don't use ffdshow to encode. The h.264 encoder hasn't been updated in a few years and missing many key features

Use x264vfw if you have to use vdub/vdubmod . Use larger consecutive b-frame count for better compression where there is little to no motion and static content; use slower presets for better compression as a starting point

Consider using VFR if you have many duplicate frames (only frames that are different are encoded) .