My movie collection file size ballooned from around 300GB to 1.2TB. I couldn’t understand why, since I only recorded a couple more movies from my cable box.
I scanned through my videos only to find that the last movies copied over were 140Gb to 170GB in size. I must have picked the wrong codecs to save in Open Broadcaster Software (OBS).
I wrote about this before about reducing the size of videos using Handbrake.
How To Reduce Video Size With Handbrake
The goal is to find the perfect balance between video quality and size. After a little research, I came across some preset settings that did a pretty good job. I saved the presets for future use.
Open Handbrake and click on the “Preset” option, scroll to the bottom of the list, and select “Production Standard”.
Select the summary tab. For “Format”, I set it to “MP4”.
I also checked “Web Optimized”, “Align A/V Start”, and “Passthru Common Metadata”.
Then I clicked on the “Video” tab. I set the “Video Encoder” to “H.264 (x264)”.
For the “Framerate (FPS), I set it to “Same as source” and checked the “Constant Framerate” option just under it – the “Constant Quality” slider I set to 23. Lower values equal higher quality but larger files.
I didn’t touch any other settings.
So now I want to save this preset. Click on the “Save New Preset” and give it a name. I saved mine as “pro-stand”.
You can manage these presets by clicking on the “Presets” icon in the top menu. Then, right-click on a preset to view your editing options, such as “Set Default”, “Edit”, “Delete”, and so on.
The “Options” icon gives you the same right-click menu items.
So how did it work? I was able to knock down a few 100GB+ videos to an average of 4GB each, and it only took, on average, about 25 minutes each. The quality was pretty good, as well.
These are just suggestions, but you are free to experiment with your own settings. Create your own presets. Whatever works for you.
For more articles on recordings, click here.
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