Let's say I downloaded some videos from the internet using perfectly legitimate means, and I need to transcode them to a format that is supported by a hardware media player.
Is there a tool (or, ideally, some setting in ffmpeg) that can estimate the "quality" of the input video, so that I don't waste too much space trying to re-encode it with settings meant to preserve fidelity that my input file lacks?
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@eamon I guess ffprobe should help https://ffmpeg.org/ffprobe.html
@nicolaromano also, my poor old laptop shut itself down when I tried to do this because it overheated. I wish I knew how to, like, underclock a single process. Maybe renice it all the way down?
@nicolaromano thanks for pointing this out to me! If nothing else, I feel like easily extracting the bitrate will prove useful.
FWIW, I'm finding a lot of H.265 videos but my Roku's DLNA player can only decode H.264. Unless I find a better solution, I'll probably just target the same approximate bitrate and accept a minor loss in quality.