Cheat sheets and presets-settings that actually work with FFmpeg 1.0?
FFmpeg does not include text file based presets and profiles anymore for libx264, i.e. what you've used with the -vpre option. These have been depreciated and removed in favor of accessing the actual x264 presets, profiles (and tunes) with the -preset, -profile:v, and -tune options. The old text files only emulated the official x264 presets and profiles, and due to several limitations could not offer full functionality that the new system provides. It is also much easier to maintain.
Additionally, many encoders have their own separate options; also called "private options". You will have to look into the audio and video encoder options for common codecs in the FFmpeg online documentation, or check the output of ffmpeg -h full for a complete list of supported options. For example, x264 lists its options under libx264 AVOptions in the full help output.
If your ffmpeg supports -preset then any text file presets should not be used, and FFmpeg no longer comes with any other than some non-standard iPod presets. It is a common misconception that text presets can simply be copied from anywhere and used with any ffmpeg. This is untrue and will result in breakage.
Basically, the presets allowed you to do the following things:
Control quality
Quality is controlled either by specifying a bitrate through -b:v (for video) or -b:a (for audio), or by specifying any other encoding method the codec might support.
For x264, there are various encoding methods, with the Constant Rate Factor method being the most sophisticated. It results in variable bitrate, but overall good quality in one single pass. CRF values range from 0 to 51, but sane values are somewhere between 19 and 26, depending on your source and what quality you want. 23 is default, so you could for example choose 18 for "high quality" and 28 for "low quality", whatever that means for you.
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libx264 -crf 23 output.mp4
x264 has other encoding methods as well, but this is out of the scope here.
Constrain the H.264 profile
These profiles define a feature set the encoder may use to match the capabilities of a certain decoder. In recent FFmpeg, use the following syntax to specify a profile, where profile could be baseline, main or high:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libx264 -profile:v baseline output.mp4
For more info and when you should use which profile, see: What are the differences between H.264 Profiles?
Choose an x264 encoding preset
These presets affect the encoding speed. Using a slower preset gives you better compression, or quality per filesize, whereas faster presets give you worse compression. In general, you should just use the preset you can afford to wait for. Presets can be ultrafast, superfast, veryfast, faster, fast, medium (default), slow and veryslow. Here's an example:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libx264 -preset slow output.mp4
Encode lossless video
This is possible by specifying a CRF of 0, so simply use -crf 0:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libx264 -crf 0 output.mp4
Finally, let's talk about ProRes quickly. ProRes accepts either a fixed bitrate with -b:v, or you can specify the profile, which should be a value between 0 and 3, where the bit rates are chosen according to the profile. Higher means better:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v prores -profile:v 0 output.mov
The ffmbc Wiki suggests that names of profiles can be used – this however fails in FFmpeg 1.0.
I did a test in which I trans-coded (using libx264 encoding to .mp4) a high quality video from a Sony camcorder using the full range of preset values (except placebo) on a range of CRF values (18, 21, 24, and 27). I wanted to know what would give me the best combination of encoding speed, output quality and file size.
For each CRF value, I gave each trans-code operation a score for its encode time (e.g., for CRF = 18, preset value ultrafast's time of 5.7 seconds got a score of 1.0, veryslow's time of 162 seconds got a 0, with all other scores scaled in between). I calculated output file size scores similarly, of course giving the smallest file the best score. I then added the two scores for a "combined" speed/size score.
For each of the four CRF values, the "veryfast" preset was the hands-down winner, with nearly perfect scores of 1.94 (for CRF 18 and 21), 1.96 (CRF 24) and 1.97 (CRF 27). I find it very curious that "veryfast" produced nearly the smallest file size every time, losing only to "veryslow" and never by much.
One difference I did notice among the various preset values was that the operating system (Windows 7) would give me different thumbnails. The faster presets would show a thumbnail several seconds into the video, where the thumbnails for the slower presets would reflect the opening frame(s) of the video. That's not important for me; what I learned was that "-preset veryfast" seems to be an easy choice.
Here are my results (as a snapshot image of an Excel spreadsheet):
Here is the Excel spreadsheet as csv text:
CRF,Preset,Seconds,score,MB,score,totalscore
18,1_ultrafast,5.7,1.00,59.5,0.09,1.09
18,2_superfast,8.4,0.98,62.3,0.00,0.98
18,3_veryfast,10.8,0.97,30.9,0.98,1.94
18,4_faster,16.0,0.93,33.5,0.89,1.83
18,5_fast,24.0,0.88,36.8,0.79,1.68
18,6_medium,29.1,0.85,34.9,0.85,1.70
18,7_slow,48.1,0.73,33.9,0.88,1.61
18,8_slower,84.9,0.49,33.0,0.91,1.40
18,9_veryslow,162.0,0.00,30.1,1.00,1.00
21,1_ultrafast,5.7,1.00,38.0,0.00,1.00
21,2_superfast,7.9,0.98,35.0,0.15,1.14
21,3_veryfast,10.0,0.97,19.0,0.97,1.94
21,4_faster,14.2,0.94,21.0,0.87,1.80
21,5_fast,19.9,0.89,23.0,0.77,1.66
21,6_medium,24.6,0.86,22.0,0.82,1.67
21,7_slow,43.1,0.72,21.0,0.87,1.58
21,8_slower,69.8,0.51,20.5,0.89,1.41
21,9_veryslow,137.3,0.00,18.4,1.00,1.00
24,1_ultrafast,5.5,1.00,24.9,0.00,1.00
24,2_superfast,7.5,0.98,21.4,0.27,1.25
24,3_veryfast,9.3,0.97,12.0,0.99,1.96
24,4_faster,13.2,0.93,14.0,0.84,1.77
24,5_fast,17.4,0.90,15.0,0.76,1.66
24,6_medium,21.0,0.87,14.4,0.81,1.67
24,7_slow,37.3,0.72,14.0,0.84,1.56
24,8_slower,62.2,0.51,13.0,0.92,1.42
24,9_veryslow,121.1,0.00,11.9,1.00,1.00
27,1_ultrafast,5.5,1.00,16.8,0.00,1.00
27,2_superfast,7.4,0.98,13.6,0.38,1.36
27,3_veryfast,9.0,0.97,8.4,1.00,1.97
27,4_faster,12.6,0.93,10.1,0.80,1.73
27,5_fast,15.8,0.90,10.4,0.76,1.66
27,6_medium,18.8,0.87,10.0,0.81,1.68
27,7_slow,34.1,0.73,9.8,0.83,1.56
27,8_slower,59.6,0.48,9.0,0.93,1.41
27,9_veryslow,109.7,0.00,8.4,1.00,1.00