Some tips on recoding videos(h264,h265, bik, bk2)

[elit]

Preface:
Today, rarely anyone recode game materials, including videos. While I myself always appreciated untouched quality, I still advocated for videos(only) recoding and I do that for my own backups. The question is, is it worth it?
For at least some games I say definitely yes if you can save significant space(from 1gb up). And that can only apply if you can recode it so that it look good enough.

What would you say about this quality?:
rcmpbk2.png

^That is a screenshot of a video stretched on fullHD monitor. Its resolution is only 640x360, or 1/3rd of original resolution. Is it good enough? Now about size, its about 20% of original space, or ~80% less than original - is it good enough now for such saved space?

To give you more specific examples, my recoded video folder of Ghost Recon Wildlands is only 1.42GB size, Quantum Break videos(not the streamed ones) have around 10GB, I got them to 2GB(but I also nulled 4k ones). It is not atypical for me to see a video that originally had say 300MB to get it to like 25-35MB. An intro of game Last Day Of June had I think 160MB+? Or more, well I got it to(get ready) ~10MB. While still looking more or less like this one. Bottom line is you can save several gigs while keeping very reasonable quality of videos if you go this route.

Even better, with my tips you should be able to get approximately same quality and size ratio on all modern formats: bik, bk2, h264, h265. Older are different subject not worth bothering anymore.

Solution:
The trick is to:
- find proper resolution
- target specific bitrate instead of quality preset.

Upon many testings I found that 640x360 is the best lowest resolution before getting "too far". This resolution is exact 1/3 of 1920x1080 so even a bit less than half. It is also same ratio. Next I found that the best bitrate for this res. on any mentioned formats was 320k. This is it.

One interesting discovery I found was during recoding mentioned Last Day Of June intro. H264 vs h265. We often read how h265 is superior that it can give you much smaller size with same quality(or better quality on same size) than h264 right? This I tested once ago and found to be true, I always got better results with h265, until I tried differently with that intro video recently. You see, you do get better results if you use quality presets(crf...), but my recent discovery left me stunned:

I recoded said video into both h264 and h265 for comparison but I targeted specific bitrate(again 640x360, 320k) instead of crf preset. What I got was both videos having +- exact same size(except maybe few kb) and they look same! I honestly couldnt see a difference, there probably was some but so small you really have to look for it. It was same to me, same size and same quality. So much for h265.

With that said, I found this consistent, bink formats same good results and so on.

So my advice is:
- do recode vids if they have 2gb or more (FitGirl...^_^)
- use exact 640x360 resolution *and* 320k bitrate on *any* mentioned format
- if some of vids have a different resolution but still same ratio(1280x720 to be specific), also do the same as above
- if some videos do have other ratio or smaller resolution(be wary that many games do mix), use 320k bitrate but *keep original resolution*
- for too small size vids it may not be worth it, sometimes you may get bigger size than original(apply to 1,2-mb size vids) so compare them and use smaller!
- you can try also downsampling/capping audio to 32000Hz and on bink formats *use compression and set it to level "4" and not any other*
- if you get a crash on bk2 videos(during compression) that have mono 8bit silent sound track and no audio when played, compress them without audio
- on bink set "peek data" rate at 1.0(important)
- on bink also set preview frames to 64(max)
- use ffmpeg for h264 and h265, use HW acc. nvidia lib if you can(I do) and set its preset to "slow"
- on SW ffmpeg for h264 and h265 I dont remember exactly but I think I used presets "slowest" for h264 and "slower" for h265, I think "slower" or "slow" for both will be just fine though
- using "baseline" preset for h264 is good enough and necessary to play in WMP and default codecs(on Win 7 at least) - i use that, some games didnt output anything when WMP also cant!
- never ever use crf/quality presets, always target bitrate
- I never bother with extra settings and filters(e.g. denoise, deblock or whatever - just leave codec's default)

EDIT: Make sure you read my post #18 on this thread where I describe how to preserve multi-audio tracks of bink videos after recoding!

EDIT2: Following(constantly updated) are the currently recommended bitrates for different codecs(Resolution remain same for all: 640:-1):
- bik, bk2: 320k
- h264: 768k - 1280k
- vp8: 768k - 1280k
- vp9: 320k
- mpeg4: 1280k
- divx: 1280k
- wmv8: 1280k

- aac: 64k
- vorbis: 64k
- opus: 64k
- mp3: 96k - 128k