Handbrake neat settings to share and your thoughts

[Norman Black]

[jenny gold] “high bit rate he went for in his screen shot max 24,000 and average 12,000”

One very important difference here, that is a 1080p30 template and NOT 720p30. Those settings are the same as the MC AVC Internet 1080p defaults. We have been talking about 720p files. 1080 has roughly twice as many pixels to encode as 720 has. Therefore 12Mbps in 1080 is actually a little lower relative bitrate than 8Mbps in 720. It is only a 50% higher bitrate for twice as many pixels.

For a lot of source material you don’t need twice the bitrate, in 1080 vs 720, to maintain similar quality but it is something of a common convention. My GoPro cameras do this. Smugmug online video does this.

[Norman Black]

Grazie,

I forgot to mention that with Handbrake and AAC output, you should use the FDK AAC encoder. It is much better, as they document. I output LAME MP3.

With all this talk about frameserving to Handbrake, I just played around with a little frame serving to ffmpeg (same x264 encoder) playing with settings for online upload.

I came up with CRF 28 at high profile for 720p30. I got about 4.5Mbps average bitrate. I tried Fast, Medium and Slow presets. Slow took twice as long as Fast but came in at about the same bitrate and looked the same. 2:50 versus 4:50 encode time.

That was with my source material. A GoPro mounted to a mountain bike. Unlike most other peoples source material. If I had to guess, with more common source material, you could probably use a lower CRF value for a similar bitrate. My material does not compress very well.

For what it’s worth here is my ffmpeg script I use to frameserve.
cd d:\renders
d:

echo AviSource("server.avi") > server.avs

c:\systools\ffmpeg32\bin\ffmpeg.exe -i server.avs -threads 0 -c:vcodec libx264 -vf scale=w=-1:h=720:flags=lanczos -preset fast -profile:v high -crf 28 -pix_fmt yuvj420p -c:a libmp3lame -qscale:a 2 output.mp4

del server.avs

pause

[Jane Kong]

Thx for your posting. I used Handbrake a lot. But after all , this is a free app. And sometimes , I will turn to other paid apps to finish my conversion, recently, I would like to convert my videos into H.265 which the quality is better while file size is much smaller.