A consulting client sent the following command string for a 1080p file they were encoding for upload to Vimeo, their online video platform. crf=20:vbv-maxrate=10000:vbv-bufsize=9500 What’s wrong with these parameters? First, some theory. One distinction to understand when encoding files is the difference between producing a mezzanine file to use for subsequent transcoding and encoding for distribution. When producing a mezzanine …

It’s a well-known and oft-repeated truism that codecs operate more efficiently at higher resolutions. The question is, is the truism really true? It turns out that it is, and we prove it below. To lend numbers to our truism and focus the issue, the basic question is this. 8K video has 16 times the pixels of 1080p videos. So, if …

I’ve been wondering if publishers still care about constraining their maximum bitrates (see here for more background), so I grabbed my copy of youtube-dl and performed a little study. The TL/DR version seems to be that new media sites like YouTube, Facebook, and Vimeo don’t strictly adhere to the typical 200% constrained VBR limit while traditional publishers seem to, though …