[FFmpeg-user] ffmpeg bitrate flag

[Moritz Barsnick]

On Wed, Sep 03, 2014 at 12:52:43 +0200, Francois Visagie wrote:
> [A. Semprimožnik wrote:]
> > number of videos is transcoded to MPEG1 and OGG. Those videos are then

MPEG1 video, honestly? Is there any player out there which _doesn't_
support something more effective? Just wondering.

> > My question is, are there any flag in ffmpeg, that sets bitrate dynamically
> > based on video content at transcoding time. What I mean by that, for
> > example, if a video is static, we don’t need high bitrate for new video when
> > decoding (static scene, where just one object is moving a little for example).
> > When video is full of action for example, so it is very dynamic, we need
> > higher bitrate to achieve a good quality of a video.

Most codecs aren't constant bitrate by default anyway, so if you're
specifying "-b" ("-b:v"), you're forcing the codec to try to retain the
bitrate. Wikipedia even explicitly mentions "Vorbis is inherently
variable-bitrate (VBR)".

By the way, we haven't seen your command line, so we don't know
what you've already been trying.

> If you specify a maximum (reasonable) bitrate and use two-pass
> encoding, the encoder will achieve what you want automatically. It
> will allocate as much bitrate as possible to high-motion or -detail
> sequences, and as little as possible to the opposite. Two-pass
> encoding may not be ideal during live streaming; in that case
> consider "average bitrate encoding".

While I agree with this procedure, I would first try with the "normal"
VBR/ABR tuning parameters, and omit "-b". libx264 takes (among others)
"-crf", which influences the quality. The resulting bitrates varies
according to the video material. ffmpeg's libvorbis documentation
mentions "q":

‘q (-q)’
    Set constant quality setting for VBR. The value should be a float
    number in the range of -1.0 to 10.0. The higher the value, the
    better the quality. The default value is ‘3.0’.

Try playing with these and see if the results are what you expect.

Moritz