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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Don't even have to set your sail; this landlubber likes likes to shoot videos with a smartphone, and these days, recording a few minutes of a family event, or even your plane taking off, in decent quality, will easily give you a multi-gigabyte video file. And that's for normal videos; $deity help you if you enable HDR.

And yes, this is the universal answer to "how much storage is enough" - use cases will grow to consume generally-available computing resources. Today it's 4k UHD + HDR; tomorrow it'll be 8k UHD + HDR, few years later it will be 120 FPS lightfield recording with separate high-resolution radar depth map channel. And as long as progress in display tech keeps pace, the benefits will be apparent, and adoption will be swift.

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I'll be curious to see the file sizes for Apple's version of 3D video capture in their Vision goggles. After one, two or three generations, I'm sure the first gen files will look small and lacking.

Of course. It won't encode touch and smell.

I've actually found my videos are not increasing as rapidly as I would expect. I've been reencoding in x265 and the file size difference is shocking. Right now I'm not ditching the existing original files but I may do that at some point, or just offload to a cloud service like Glacier

I’m right up next to a limit on live (easily-accessible, always visible in photo apps) cloud storage, with years of family photos and video taking about 95% of that.

I definitely don’t want to delete any of it, so I have been just hoping for bigger storage to be offered soon, but…

I hadn’t considered that re-encoding could be an option. I take standalone snapshots of everything every few months so if re-encoding would make a significant difference I might have to try this.

Do you have any tips on tools, parameters etc. that work well for you, please?

I use a shell script with ffmpeg. I encourage you to check out what works best for you but honestly the quality is pretty stellar with just a really simple one like

    mkdir -p reencoded

    ffmpeg -i input_filename.mp4 -c:v libx265 -crf 26 -preset fast -c:a aac -b:a 128k reencoded/output_filename.mp4

That's a fast single-pass constant quality encode - a two-pass encode would be better quality for the size but I find that very acceptable. It knocks down what would be a ~2gb file all the way to between 800mb - 1200mb with very reasonable quality, sometimes even more - I've seen a 5gb file become a 400mb file (!!). You can experiment with the -crf 26 parameter to get the quality/size tradeoff you like. I run that over every video in the directory as a cron job basically.

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