02-02-2021, 04:59 PM
mikebw wrote:
[quote=M A V I C]
The other challenge is transcoding creates a lot larger files than the original.
Just want to clear this up- transcoding by definition takes a file of one format and re-encodes it into another. It does not always mean larger!
One could easily take a file and make it smaller, trouble is the files we tend to consume and deliver are already encoded at low bitrates to conserve space, so to make it smaller you would need to lower the bitrate even more undoubtedly affecting the image quality.
Of course if you mean to edit a file it might make sense to transcode to a less compressed format do reduce the load on your CPU, but as you correctly noted this does increase the file size!
I took the file, used VLC to transcode it to the same resolution, frame rate and bitrate as the source. I chose to copy the audio since it worked fine. The output file was nearly 3x as large. Both were h.264. I didn't dig in enough to figure out why it was that much bigger, but since this will be a repeated process and it works on other machines and it used to work on this machine, I'd like to avoid the transcoding process.