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The external hard drive on my HTPC is almost full and so I'm going to need to convert a large number of the films recorded from the television (in WTV format) into something smaller. At present, a 2 hour film is about 3-4GB.
I've tried converting the WTV file to DVR-MS (using the built in wtvconverter.exe
) and then running it through handbrakecli with the following command line:
handbrakecli.exe --input "film.dvr-ms" --output "film.mp4" --encoder x264 --quality 20
In Handbrake, this would be by setting the output to MP4, the encoder to x264 and the quality to 20.
The problem is that the resulting MP4 is between 1.5 and 2GB which, whilst smaller than the original file, still seems insane for a 2 hour long SD film recorded off (a PAL) television! I would expect something like that to be 700-800MB, if not less.
Setting the quality to 19 degrades the picture to the point it's unwatchable.
Can anyone recommend settings for Handbrake (or handbrakecli) which will convert a DVR-MS file into a much smaller size?
(I'm not particularly precious about the codec or the container, but would prefer something reasonably standard to ensure it can be watched on a high number of computers and mobile devices)
UPDATE
It's probably not clear, but if you only know what the settings are to convert a file using the graphical version of Handbrake, then that is a perfectly good answer!
Added some info on how to change the quality, if needed. – slhck – 2012-07-16T20:34:53.503
Very useful. I also found out that you shouldn't de-interlace a video (using
– Richard – 2012-07-16T20:37:17.553-filter:v yadif
) if it's not already interlaced otherwise the quality will get worse. There is a question here if people want to work out whether or not the recorded file needs de-interlacing.Yup – that's how I found this post anyway :) – slhck – 2012-07-16T20:41:11.080