I know for photos i could throw them through something like Converseen to take them from .jpg to .jxl, preserving the quality (identical visially, even when pixel peeping), but reducing file size by around 30%. What about video? My videos are in .h265, but can i reencode them more efficiently? im assuming that if my phone has to do live encoding, its not really making it as efficient as it could. could file sizes be reduced without losing quality by throwing some processing time at it? thank you all
This is not the helpful answer you were looking for, sorry. I’m fairly certain that the consensus among data hoarders is that the answer is more storage space not smaller files.
You can absolutely re-encode h265 video, but you can’t do it losslessly. In the end, it’s always a balance between quality and filesize.
I decided for myself, that 1080p30 crf28 h265 is good enough for home video, which lead to a 50% to 80% storage space reduction on videos from my phone.
If you don’t obsess over quality, I would highly recommend just messing around with ffmpeg a little bit and decide how much quality you’re willing to lose in order to save disk space. When you’re happy with your settings, you can either use ffmpeg itself or some fancy batch program like Tdarr to transcode all (or parts of) your video library.
My goto command is:
for file in *.mp4; do ffmpeg -i "$file" -movflags use_metadata_tags -map_metadata 0 -vcodec libx265 -crf 28 -vf scale=1920:-1 -r 30 "${file%.*}_transcoded.mp4"; done
You will not gain much from reencoding or compressing these kinds of files. They are already compressed in a way purpose-built for their application. If you have source materials, like blu-ray discs, you can reencode with more aggressive h.265 settings. But this will probably not do better than shrink 5-30%.
It is usually a better use of time and resources to get more storage.
This is what I always think. The real movie was hundreds of gigs, maybe TBs. What you get on the Blu-ray is already compressed to all hell but perfectly mastered to hide as much compression as possible. Why would you want compress it even worse? Hard drives are cheap, if you already want to store 1080p/4k copies of movies, just admit you’re like us and pick up a couple 20TB drives
Offhand I think AV1 is supposed to be a bit better than H265, but I think the improvement would be pretty marginal. Also, that’s a newer codec with less support everywhere, so you might find yourself slowing down a lot doing live transcoding to a format with better support like H265 or H264, depending on your devices. Add in all the time transcoding your current files from H265 to AV1 and it might just be worth adding more storage space.
I have a lot of artworks I downloaded over years that were saved in png files and after converting them loslessly to avif I still was able to regain some space.
For videos you cant afford lossless if you want to recover space but visually lossless results are usually good enough on AV1
