[FFmpeg-user] Good royalty free codec to encode H.264 video with.

[Andrei Petru Mura]

Hello,

*Note:* I'm not experienced in the matter of video programming or
processing. If you see some ridiculous mistakes, please be patient and feel
free to correct me.

I have some videos encoded with a H.264 codec. They are of a very good
quality. (A file of 1 hour has 2-3 GB.) I would need to convert those files
(about 200) to a format encoded with a royalty free codec. I tried to
convert them using MJPEG codec, but when I try to preserve best quality,
the resulted files are huge: about 50 GB. I used something like.

ffmpeg -c:v h264 -i /path/to/file.avi -map 0:0 -c:v mjpeg -r 30 -qmin 1
-qmax 1 -an -vf hfpli /new/path/to/resulted/file.avi

*N.B.:* I put the whole command for having a clear idea of what I'm talking
about.

Trying to increase the -qmax to 8, I still get a huge file, but more
reasonably (~10-15 GB). The problem is that increasing -qmax, some quality
issues are visible.

I tried to do the same thing, but using a different encoder, namely
libvpx-vp9. The resulted file is at a size comparable with H.264, but there
are 2 issues: the quality is clearly lower than the original file and the
conversion time is effectively enormous. Here is the command that I used:

ffmpeg -c:v h264 -i /path/to/file.avi -map 0:0 -c:v libvpx-vp9 -qmin 0
-qmax 5 -crf 2 -b:v 1M -an -vf hflip -threads 4 /new/path/to/file.webm

*Question:*
Can anybody suggest me a royalty free encoder that I could use for my
needs? I would need to be able also to encode with it video files in a
relatively good time. Can you give me some hints on this?

I'm aware that currently H.264 is the best standard regarding
compression-quality in my scenario (I don't want to create a debate right
now on that topic). I would need an encoder that would be able to get the
same video quality at a reasonable size - let's say what's over 10GB at a
file of 1 hour is too much. I also tried to encode with libtheora, but the
conversion time is huge (similar to vp9).