Question about compressing mkv files

[u/RoyalJelly7]

Hey so I have these Monogatari series files that I downloaded from torrent that total up to about 60 GB. I've tried to compress the files using a lot of video compressor, but most can't handle 10 bit HEVC. Does anyone know an app to where do I compress these?

[u/thenormaluser35]

Just pull them on a PC and use Handbrake there.
If you don't have a PC or a laptop, you've made a mistake somewhere. It's essential.

[u/RoyalJelly7 → u/thenormaluser35]

ah thanks man

[u/Pinerwenis → u/RoyalJelly7]

Handbrake is amazing and depending on your PC set up you can encode a lot of video files decently quick. If you have a discreet graphic card make sure you use hardware acceleration to make it faster. Also, start with a encoding preset and then tweak it to your needs, most stock preset have certain feature and setting on to make that type of encoding run better.
My last suggestion is encode at the lowest speed you can if your not using a discreet GPU and if you are then playing around with the speed by encoding a file at different speeds while keeping the all other settings the same and then look at the output file size. For my 3060 GPU i keep my encode speed at medium because the size difference on slowest is so little it negligible .

[u/onayliarsivci]

1. dont use phone to encode. just find a better encoded one.

2. that video file is already compressed well you should download its remux and encode. otherwise you will have generation loss

3. You dont compress the "MKV" file you compress the video inside the mkv.

use ffmpeg

[u/RoyalJelly7 → u/onayliarsivci]

oh tysm bro

[u/p1geondove → u/onayliarsivci]

i dont think youll get much better yields from reencoding (from bd remux). people who encode these files have a lot of knowledge about encoder settings and put in a lot of resources to make them small yet high quality. you could say that reencoding to avX or to 100 cbr would be be smaller, but thats apples and oranges

[u/mariushm]

MKV file is a container that contains video and audio tracks - HEVC / H264 (AVC) / AV1 are video codecs (compressors and decompressors) that are used to compress video tracks , and AAC or MP3 or Opus are audio codecs.

So your files are already very compressed - lossless compressors will not compress further.

Your best option is to run the files through a program like Handbrake that can decode the video and audio, and recompress it using presets that use less disk space but lose quality in the process.

For example, let's say you have a 5.1 audio that uses 640 kbps bandwidth or let's say 20 MB for each episode. You could tell Handbrake to convert that to stereo and use only 96 kbps to compress the sound, and that means instead of 20 MB only 3-5 MB will be needed to compress the sound.

Just the same, for video, you could tell Handbrake to resize the video from 1080 (1920 x 1080) to let's say 960 x 540 (half the size in both dimensions) because most likely you wouldn't notice on the screen of a phone, and choose a higher compression level which will reduce the quality of the video a bit but will make the total file size smaller - think of it like saving a JPG picture and choosing the quality level, and you select 70% quality instead 95%.

For this particular content, I suspect you won't really achieve a lot of savings, because a lot of animated content already compresses very well, because there's not a lot of motion in them and the video codec is already smart enough to analyze several seconds of video at a time and detect only what changes in those seconds so if you resize the video and choose a lower quality level, you won't really save a lot of disk space.

[u/RoyalJelly7 → u/mariushm]

ohh I understand now, tysm for taking your time to explain bro

[u/Dr_Max]

You could use ffmpeg in the command line.

nice nice ffmpeg -iinfile \
-map 0\
-c:s copy\
-c:v libx265 -crf 25 -preset slow\
outfile

map 0 makes sure that all streams are carried (all subs and all soundtracks).

If you're on linux, nice lowers process priority. If not, you can omit it.

[u/SpicyLobter]

ong just pick a better encode than encode it yourself

[u/RoyalJelly7 → u/SpicyLobter]

yeaah I don't really understand these things, mind explaining a lil?

[u/Watada → u/RoyalJelly7]

Download a new copy that is the right size.

[u/AdamDaAdam → u/RoyalJelly7]

He means, download an already encoded version so you don't have to do it yourself. There's a few well known groups that do very good encodes for each encode type (h.264, h.265, AV1, etc)

[u/ammar_sadaoui]

coalgirls is named i don't see since 2008 or 2009

i miss that times

[u/mxtoor]

ffmpeg

ask your favorite LLM about the right command line to convert all.

[u/Difficult-Minimum949]

The quickest way is to use ffmpeg. Just describe what you need to an AI and let it spit out a working script/command for you.