But x265 is not yet as mature in its development as x264, so take that CRF equivalence with a pinch of salt. x265 CRF 28 is supposedly equivalent to x264 CRF 23. The CRF scales for x264 and x265 do not correspond. They are: ultrafast, superfast, veryfast, faster, fast, medium, slow, slower, veryslow, placebo (ignore placebo it's too slow for any potential significant advantage over veryslow).* Now use the same -crf and -preset for the rest of your batch of videos.' Use the slowest preset you have patience for.

You basically only need to change -crf and -preset to match your quality and speed requirements: Quoting Lord Neckbeards accurate statements. The best compression available at the moment of writing is H.265Įxample: H.265 HEVC video + stream copied audio in Matroskaįfmpeg -i inputfile -c:a copy -c:v libx265 -preset veryfast -x265-params crf=25 -vf scale=-8:ih outputfile.mkv

Also, re-encoding may not help if the originals were encoded properly with a modern, efficient format. If I were in this situation I'd probably just keep the original videos and not bother with re-encoding. With all of that, I must point out that 25G is small and storage is cheap. The audio is being stream copied instead of re-encoded because the vast majority of data will be video. Now use the same -crf and -preset for the rest of your batch of videos. They are: ultrafast, superfast, veryfast, faster, fast, medium, slow, slower, veryslow, placebo (ignore placebo it's too slow for any potential significant advantage over veryslow). Around 18 is considered visually lossless. Use the highest -crf value that still gives an acceptable quality. You basically only need to change -crf and -preset:

While H.265 looks good on paper the implementations just are not quite there yet for typical usage (unless your time is cheap because it is slow). H.264 video via the encoder libx264 is your best bet right now. Example: H.264 video + stream copied audio in Matroska ffmpeg -i input -c:v libx264 -crf 23 -preset medium -c:a copy output.mkvĪnything WMV is a joke.

Ffmpeg h264 to h265