Good evening gentlehooves and gentleponers,
Today, I was experimenting with different qualities of audio and videos in order to try to save space on my server. It took a little work, but I was able to discover what the best video resolution and audio quality settings might be for uploading videos I talk about about on this website. The best video size and audio quality has been determined to be: 320×240, 96bitrate and 192samplerate (mp3 quality). Compared to the smallest recommended size in the converter program I am using (HandBrake (https://handbrake.fr/)), I estimate this would save about 60-70% of server storage space. Interestingly, decreasing the video size did not seem to decrease the file size as much as decreasing the audio quality, at least when the audio quality was reduced to very low levels, such as in the first example below:
Video 1: 12bitrate, 24 samplerate – obvious quality issues, artifacts – can’t hear higher shaking instrument (maraca/maracas?)
Video 2: 24bitrate, 48 samplerate, or about CD-quality; just noticed video didn’t finish converting for some reason – quality comparable to 96bitrate, 192samplerate, but I guessed it had something to do with the coincidental alignment of the coincidental alignment into nice fractions of the bitrate I was converting from and the bitrate I was converting to – can hear higher maraca instrument; also possible that the video converter failed to convert it properly or user error – more data needed to confirm
Video 3: 48bitrate, 96 samplerate – no artifacts, can’t hear higher maraca instrument(s), can hear lower guitar notes but somewhat muted
Another interesting note was that by setting the samplerate to 3x the bitrate in one test, the resulting video had lower quality than videos where the overall quality of the bitrate and samplerate together were lower but more similar.
Conclusion: Here is the smallest size (96 bitrate, 192 samplerate) that I have decided will probably work well with any video conversion:
You seem to be able to hear everything that you hear in the highest-quality version (see my previous post (https://ponypurist.com/2024/10/wide-filly/) for comparison), yet in some cases not quite as clearly. Even so, the audio changes are minor and worth it to save server space. For the highest-quality version of a song, always be sure to check out the link to the original upload.
Here is the AAC version of the song. (The file size was the same as with the MP3 version, and I couldn’t really tell a difference in quality. It would be interesting to try an experiment to see if there is any noticeable difference in audio quality between the two codecs.
24bitrate, 24samplerate
32bitrate, 48samplerate
48bitrate, 24samplerate
(Notice the absence of a clear maraca sound in all of the above three videos.)
Have a good Horseday.
Attributions:
ElectroKaplosion. “Wide Filly.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K11LtnNbKxY.