[FFmpeg-user] -crf ignored

[Thomas Worth]

On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 3:50 PM, Phil Rhodes <phil_rhodes at rocketmail.com>wrote:

> I have historically found it very difficult to make ffmpeg obey bitrate
> commands - it seems to encode at the rate it thinks it wants to encode and
> woe betide you if you want anything else.
>
> Presets can be tricky becuase many windows builds don't include them, if
> you can get them they're very difficult to edit because they have Unix
> linefeeds, and in any case I don't think I've ever once got a windows build
> of ffmpeg to read a preset - no matter how hard you try, it always seems to
> complain it can't find them, even when they're colocated with the executable
> or in the current directory or whatever. This is presumably an issue of
> directory resolution which has failed to port cleanly but if you're not on a
> Unix-like OS then that may be a problem for you.


I don't use libx264 with FFmpeg. I use standalone x264 and just pipe from
FFmpeg. Most of the time, I don't need 2-pass encoding because I don't care
about hitting a particular file size so piping works for me. Plus, when new
x264 features arise, we have to wait for FFmpeg to support them with its
command line options. I find it easier to just pipe raw yuv420p to x264.

That said, doesn't standalone x264 have presets built-in? Perhaps you could
avoid the directory hassle by using standalone x264, although I haven't
tried this on Windows.

t