[rolobio]

I looked into using ffmpeg to “compress” video podcasts by lowering the framerate a lot, but it didn’t seem to do as much as I thought (about 50% size reduction). The theory was that a video podcast is mostly talking heads with an occasional chart on the screen, so you really only need a frame every second, or five seconds.

[sergiotapia]

AV1 exceeds at these type of videos. It's why so many anime people use it.

Try encoding the video to AV1 with OPUS audio. You'll get ridiculous gainz!

My command is:

    $ffmpegPath -i $_.FullName -r 23.976 -vf scale=1280:720 -c:v libsvtav1 -pix_fmt yuv420p10le -crf 30 -preset 10 -g 300 -c:a libopus -b:a 96k -ac 2 -c:s copy -map 0 $destPath

[rolobio]

Thanks I will give it a try.

[invalidator]

Reducing framerate doesn't help much when there isn't a lot changing between frames. Here are some better optimizations:

Noise reduction, so you compress less useless noise: -vf hqdn3d

Turn up the Constant Rate Factor. This will make better visual tradeoffs than decreasing frame rate. 23 is a good starting point for h264, but keep increasing it until you don't like how the content looks: -crf 23

Throw more CPU at the problem: -preset veryslow