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Old 31st July 2011, 14:07   #6  |  Link
CarlEdman
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Join Date: Jan 2008
Posts: 185
@shon3i I know that I can always reduce the size of the output at the expense of quality by tuning down the '-q' setting.

But for almost all purposes, I very much prefer to target a quality level I experience as transparent, rather than a fixed file size or bit rate for either audio or video. All my encodes end up on my 10 TByte NAS and I really do not care whether any particular encode of a 2 hour movie is twice as large as that of another 2 hour movie. As long as the encodes are transparent and do not waste space, I'm happy.

For some purposes (e.g., archive to small fixed-size storage medium or limited-bandwidth distribution), I can understand why people still use CBR/ABR modes for audio and video. But unless your application falls into one of those specialized categories, there is really no good reason not to go VBR for both and at least three good reason to: (1) Your encoding will be simplified, typically single-step, rather than two-step; (2) you avoid the risk of an unacceptably low-quality encode; (3) you avoid wasting space.

But, in my experience, most people still using CBR/ABR encoding have no good reason. They just have always done it that way--for example, because there once was a good reason or because VBR was not available yet--and are too intellectually lazy to switch to VBR.
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