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I want to convert an 8-bit h.265 video to h.264 without quality loss to be able to watch it on my now a bit old TV which only supports h.264.

I found this post very useful: How do I convert 10-bit H.265 / HEVC videos to H.264 without quality loss?

But for some reason the resulting h.264 video could not still be watched in my TV. This video, likewise the original, had the subtitles embedded (I don't know if this is the problem for my TV), and the audio stream was:

Format: AAC LC SBR.
Format/Info: Advanced Audio Codec Low.
Complexity with Spectral Band Replication.
Commercial name: HE-AAC.
Codec ID: A_AAC-2.

I made two changes to the ffmpeg command and it worked for me. I still don't have +50 points in the platform to add comments so for anyone with the same issue, I am writing this post and see below my own reply.

Andres
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1 Answers1

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I successfully managed to watch the video in my TV making two changes to the ffmpeg command: I removed the embedded subtitles and specified the 'traditional' Advanced video codec (AVC) that my TV supports.

As I said in my question, I followed this post: How do I convert 10-bit H.265 / HEVC videos to H.264 without quality loss? and I also followed this one to remove the embedded text: Remove embedded subtitle streams from media file without "streaming/remuxing"

So here is the final working command:

ffmpeg -i video.mkv -sn -c:v libx264 -crf 18 -vf format=yuv420p -c:a aac output.mkv

Note I didn't use the -map 0 option as it keeps all streams and I wanted to remove the text stream. Anyway, perhaps this step wasn't necessary and the only issue was with my video was the audio codec. So if you would like to keep your subtitles, you can try leaving the -map 0 and not use the -sn option which is the parameter to remove the text.

By the way, it took my medium-grade computer 40 minutes to convert the whole video which was a 60 minutes film, with an original size of 1.3 GB, and resulting in a 2.9 GB after the conversion.

Andres
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