Zoom in x200
Left: 720p x264 --> 0.25 GB
Right: 1080p x265 --> 1.11 GB
I tested watching both on my phone:
- Without zoom, I didn’t notice much difference in visuals.
- The audio is stronger at the same level on the x265 version.
- I need +15 volume level (Android) to make the x264 sound equal.
What do you think, guys? Is it worth 4 times the file size?
It depends on how you intend to view, and the source.
DVD source? No reason to go past ~~720~~ 480 as that's all they do.
Blu-ray can do a lot more.
Interestingly on a 65" 4k TV, I find most 720 sources to be fine. I did just watch Blithe Spirit from DVD and it was awful. Lots of blurriness. Someone really screwed up the encoding on that one.
As others have said, test your encoding. I've generally found with handbrake that movies converted with a Quality level 19 (H264 MKV container), reduce about 70%+. So a 4 GB video often reduces to 1 GB, and you can't see the difference on the screen.
Some you can, but those are movies with a 16:9 aspect ratio and letterboxing built into the video so DVD players show them correctly. Since that loses some pixels up front, they require using higher quality levels to prevent visual lossiness.
DVDs are 480p, not 720p.
Thanks for the correction - bunch of numbers in my head and I grabbed the first one, haha.
I have pages of notes about how to convert different types of videos with accompanying scripts for ffmpeg, so I don't really have to think about it anymore.
Yeah, I get that. I've got my Handbrake presets and that's that, so I don't need to spare it a second thought.
Letterbox and pillars baked-in actually has very little, if any, impact on filesize or quality, when encoding from the same source and settings (other than the one dimension that was trimmed)
When you go to reconvert it has noticeable impact in how you encode.
I have movies with letterboxing that's 20% of the screen. You're going to say losing 20% of your pixels to baked-in, forced letterboxing has no impact?