On 29/10/10 00:28, VDR User wrote:
I wonder if there is an easy way to recompress all recordings that are not already H.264 into H.264 files, making them a lot smaller without losing any quality.
The only way to not lose quality is to keep the bitrate high, especially for recordings with a lot of motion. You should encode with constant quality (CRF) set to whatever the minimum quality you want to preserve. You can also reduce the resolution a bit, just make sure to maintain the aspect ratio.
And don't try to scale interlaced material without using a good deinterlacing filter first.
Bottom line is that you will not get smaller filesizes without making sacrifices. Data is lost with every encoding pass.
The point of H264 is that it can achieve better quality for a better bit rate. Although some quality will be lost by transcoding, you could probably halve the file size without making a noticeable difference.