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Is there FOSS apps like curtail that can lossless compress video files? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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TLDR: Curtail losslessly compresses photos without losing date/time metadata. What program like Curtail can do the same with video's (preferably with MKV support)?

Curtail is FOSS Software for Linux that I've found extremely helpful. It's designed to bulk losslessly compress your images and photos without losing the date & time metadata in them. I've found this really helpful for skimming down the overall storage-use of my photo's.

But the thing that takes the most space on my PC is video's. You see, I record all of my videogame gameplay and store them on a hard drive. This takes many hundreds of gigabytes of space and is ever-increasing; and compressing them without losing any quality while retaining the date & time metadata is invaluable to me.

I'd love a program that functionally acts the same as curtail, but losslessly compresses each individual frame of a video rather than a photo. Curtail doesn't provide this, so does anybody know of any programs I can use that do this? MKV support is preferable, as that is how I store my video's, but still tell me about it even if it doesn't support MKV.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago

Unless your initial recordings were lossless (they probably weren’t), recompressing the files with a lossless flag will only increase the size by a lot. Lossless video is HUGE, which is why almost no one actually records/saves it. What you’re probably looking for is visually lossless transcoding, where you do lose some data, but the difference is too small for most people to notice.

My recommendations:

Go to your recording software and change the setting to better compress your videos the first time around. Compressing once generally gives a better quality to size ratio than compressing twice. It’s therefore best if your recording software get it right first time, without you having to keep on recompressing your videos.
When tinkering with encoding setting, trying to find what works best for you, it might be useful to install Identity to help you compare the original files and one or more transcoded version(s).
Don’t try to recompress the audio; you’ll save very little space, and the losses in quality become perceptible much faster than video. When using ffmpeg, the “-c:a copy” flag should simply copy the original audio to the new file, without any change in quality or size
I’d recommend taking some time to read through the ffmpeg encoding guides. H265 and AV1 are good for personal archiving, with AV1 providing better compression ratios at the cost of much slower encoding. You could also choose VP9, which is similar in compression ratio and encoding speed to h265.
You’ll have to choose between hardware and software encoding. Hardware encoding can (depending on your specific hardware and settings) be 10-100x faster than software, but software generally gives better compression ratios at similar qualities. You should test this difference for yourself and see if the extra time is worth it for the extra quality. Do keep in mind that AV1 hardware encoding is only supported by some of the most recent GPU’s (rx7000 and rtx4000 from the top of my head). If you don’t have one of those GPU’s, you’ll either have to choose software encoding or pick a different codec.