Video quality question

Teddy07 · February 25, 2019

I found a program called Handbrake which encodes the video and dramatically reduces the file size. I am wondering if this leads to a loss of quality?

The encoding as far as I understood just saves the difference from one picture to the next instead of saving the picture as a whole. This shrinks the file size to less than 10% in my case because not much is changing. I assume the video player integrated into the website or my video player must understand the encoding because the playback could not happen in other ways?

This should not lead to a loss of quality, right? At least I could not see a difference.

Jurrunio · February 25, 2019

34 minutes ago, Teddy07 said:

I am wondering if this leads to a loss of quality?

depends on the encoder and encoded file type. There are lossless compression that keeps all the quality from raw footage while still reducing file sizes (but still relatively huge file sizes compared to lossy compression).

36 minutes ago, Teddy07 said:

The encoding as far as I understood just saves the difference from one picture to the next instead of saving the picture as a whole. This shrinks the file size to less than 10% in my case because not much is changing.

many encoders (h264 for example) also compress color spacing as well, because human eyes are sensitive to brightness but not so much colour intensity.

38 minutes ago, Teddy07 said:

I assume the video player integrated into the website or my video player must understand the encoding because the playback could not happen in other ways?

Yes if you play videos with software decoding (CPU handling the work). If you use hardware acceleration (GPU hardware decoding basically), you'll need support from the GPU (new GPUs support everything, it's just dumb not to. Old GPUs though could be different)