Recently I constantly find myself having to re-encode yt-dlp
‘d video files before sending/posting them somewhere.
Here’s a super simple .bat
that you can drop in your PATH
(along with ffmpeg) to make this fast:
Usage:
reencode path_to_file optional_crf
For example:
reencode myvid.mp4
Custom encoding quality:
reencode myvid.mp4 30
- The script transcodes the file to H.264+Opus, appends
_x264
to the filename and changes the extension to.mp4
. - Adjust transcoding quality by providing the CRF after the filename.
- Useful for tweaking the file size, eg. when you’re trying to fit under Discord’s 8MB attachment size limit.
- If you omit this argument, the default value is 23.
- Values in the range of 17-28 give good results, but the full range is 0-51, where 0 is lossless and 51 is loss…ful.
- You can also switch the encoding
-preset
to match your personal patience level. - See this H.264 encoding guide for a nice summary of all available settings.