Recipe library

Working commands, not snippets from a man page — every one of these came out of a real workshop or a real job. Search by what it does or by the flag you half-remember.

h264 rate-control abr crf ffprobe inspection presets benchmark hls ladder

2 recipes tagged “rate-control”

Average bitrate (5 Mbps)

ffmpeg -i input.mov -c:v libx264 -b:v 5M -maxrate 5.35M -bufsize 7.5M -preset medium -c:a aac -b:a 128k output-abr.mp4

Predictable size. Use when a delivery spec dictates the bitrate.

h264 rate-control abr

Constant quality (CRF 20)

ffmpeg -i input.mov -c:v libx264 -crf 20 -preset medium -c:a aac -b:a 128k output-crf20.mp4

Size varies with content. This is what you want for archival and VOD masters.

h264 rate-control crf