High motion quality webm

ffmpeg by default aims for the lowest bitrate it can manage for a video when encoding webm. I have been happy with this so far, but the video I grabbed of a waterfall today does not look good in this mode. I tried changing the bitrate options as discussed on the ffmpeg wiki , I thought I would show what you can expect with a couple of differnet rates.

The original mov file generated from my camera was 21MB.

$ ffmpeg -i INPUT.mov -an output-default.webm

The original ultra low, 443kb/s that ffmpeg generates, file is 369KB.

$ ffmpeg -i DSC_3536.MOV -an -c:v libvpx -b:v 1M  output-1M.webm

Doubling the rate, file is 976KB. Still a lot of artifacts in the video.

$ ffmpeg -i DSC_3536.MOV -an -c:v libvpx -b:v 10M  output-10M.webm

This passed the smell test for me, I think it looks good enough for its size, this file is 5.6MB roughly the size of a jpeg of the same scene.