[FFmpeg-user] Running multiple ffmpeg commands with minimal loss in quality

[Francois Visagie]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ffmpeg-user [mailto:ffmpeg-user-bounces at ffmpeg.org] On Behalf Of
> Michael Nolan
> Sent: 25 July 2015 01:02
> To: ffmpeg-user at ffmpeg.org
> Subject: [FFmpeg-user] Running multiple ffmpeg commands with minimal
> loss in quality
> 
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I'm writing a video editor which will push out a large json file that
> includes the videos and a series of edits that were performed upon them. I
> have a python application which parses the json and runs ffmpeg commands
> to
> do things like overlay, scale and trim videos, render text, render images,
> etc.
> 
> The biggest issue that I have is that the application that I run has to run
> ffmpeg multiple times, thus re-encoding the video(s) and making the end
> video look much lower quality than the original content. The original
> videos are .webm and encoded using QTmuxingAppLibWebM-0.0.1.
> 
> Is there any way that I can help prevent this sort of thing or is there any
> existing tooling for taking a series of edits and running them in one
> command (meaning I don't have to re-encode multiple times)?
> 
> Any help would be appreciated.

The standard approach to this kind of issue is to use (as close to) losslessly encoded intermediate files as possible. I.e. either use a codec designed for lossless encoding such as "HuffYUV", or use something like x264 with "lossless" settings.

> 
> - Mike
> IRC: nolski
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