[FFmpeg-user] 4K Way to large to stream

[Moritz Barsnick]

On Tue, Jun 29, 2021 at 08:57:51 -0400, rbarnes at njdevils.net wrote:

> I would very much like to figure a way to Keep the 4K quality and reformat
> the video for streaming.  As an example, my daughters 2 hour recital hit the
> 80GB mark using a GoPro 9 set to record HDR.
> My ultimate goal is to have a 4K SDR video small enough to stream over PLEX.
>
> If I can avoid transcoding and keep it direct play (8 Bit, 5.1, SDR) then
> anything under 15GB will stream without buffering.

Unless that 80 GB file has 65 GB overhead (i.e. stuff not part of the
codec), you cannot achieve 15 GB without re-encoding. With re-encoding.
you cannot preserve the quality - reducing a video's size always
means reducing quality, unless you accept "reduce the quality so much
that I don't notice". And that latter subjective view is pretty much up
to you. Would you accept half the resolution (i.e. do you really need
4k on your screen)? Would you accept somewhat worse encoding quality?

It's pretty much up to you, how much reduction in quality you are
willing to accept. And to experiment whether e.g. libx264 with CRF 25
is sufficient, and brings any size reduction.

For example, I - for myself - can reencode my TV recordings (satellite
dumped to MPEG-TS on disk) from ~10 MB/s to 3 MB/s without noticing a
deterioration, in most cases. That would be acceptable to me.

Cheers,
Moritz