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

[Carl Eugen Hoyos]

Andrei Petru Mura <mapandrei <at> gmail.com> writes:

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

What is hfpli?

Mostly unrelated:
Remove "-c:v h264", it makes no sense (in most command lines), 
old documentation always suggested a minimal quantiser of "2" 
(instead of "1"), iirc that significantly reduces the filesize.

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

But you didn't think of providing the console output which 
is usually needed if you need support here ;-(

> 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 

This should not happen: If you accept a sufficiently 
high bitrate (which is much closer to h264 than mjpeg), 
you should get perfect quality with both vp8 and vp9 
(vp8 should be faster).

Concerning your original question, consider using 
mpeg1video but if vp8 is acceptable, it should be 
able to produce significantly smaller files for a 
given quality.

Carl Eugen