Converting RAW Uncompressed video back to h264 ffmpeg

[TubeBar]

I have several videos that are uncompressed raw and the original mp4 container they were presumably compressed in. I am able to re-encode them back into h264/mp4 files but was wondering if it was possible to use the container settings as the source?

I know it's lossy and going to lose quality no matter what but could I just use the mp4 container as the source encoder settings and let ffmpeg encode them exactly as the originals were?

[sneaker]

ffmpeg can't "read settings" from a source file. You can try to guess/deduct the settings from the source using MediaInfo and stream analyzing software and from there set the encoding parameters but it is a manual process. If you are lucky the source was encoded with x264 and still has x264's custom SEI with the settings.

mis2x264 could be of help but it's for x264cli, not ffmpeg so you still need to do manual work.