I'm hoping someone on this forum knows a bit about encoding and possibly re-encoding video.
The case is this: I have the episodes of a series I'm watching, but the files are gigantic, we're talking 3,5GB+ per episode. Each episode is about 45 minutes long, and the video resolution is 1080p. I assume it's used x264 for encoding, the video is in AVC, container used is .mkv.
The quality of the files is impeccable, which I assume comes down to their almost complete lack of compression, and I was wondering if I could compress them myself. I know re-encoding something that is already encoded in lossy format is bad, but these files must be using the original Blu-ray discs bitrate - otherwise they wouldn't be this size - so compressing them shouldn't degrade quality in any noticeable way, if it's possible to do it without too much hassle. (Some googling told me that blu-rays usually run at 20Mbps bitrate, these videos peak at around 15Mbps).
So can I compress them, and will it be easy, or will it be very much effort required? Do I need to synchronise the audio or something? I want to maintain as high quality as possible, and when I see that episodes of 20 minute long comedy shows can be found at 250-400MB with flawless quality (or not noticeable video compression), then surely these episodes could be squeezed down to one-third of their current size or so, at least to below 1GB without significant quality loss?
The case is this: I have the episodes of a series I'm watching, but the files are gigantic, we're talking 3,5GB+ per episode. Each episode is about 45 minutes long, and the video resolution is 1080p. I assume it's used x264 for encoding, the video is in AVC, container used is .mkv.
The quality of the files is impeccable, which I assume comes down to their almost complete lack of compression, and I was wondering if I could compress them myself. I know re-encoding something that is already encoded in lossy format is bad, but these files must be using the original Blu-ray discs bitrate - otherwise they wouldn't be this size - so compressing them shouldn't degrade quality in any noticeable way, if it's possible to do it without too much hassle. (Some googling told me that blu-rays usually run at 20Mbps bitrate, these videos peak at around 15Mbps).
So can I compress them, and will it be easy, or will it be very much effort required? Do I need to synchronise the audio or something? I want to maintain as high quality as possible, and when I see that episodes of 20 minute long comedy shows can be found at 250-400MB with flawless quality (or not noticeable video compression), then surely these episodes could be squeezed down to one-third of their current size or so, at least to below 1GB without significant quality loss?
