If you find this page, congratulations. It's not exactly public yet. I've been maintaining a website at www.scholars.uni.edu/~johnson for several years, but my time at the university is coming to an end and I've established downclimb.com as a more permanent home on the web. I'm not yet sure how I want to juggle all the content of the site, but with this page I've decided to give Blogger a try. It provides a convenient, web-based interface for updating web logs, or "blogs". I don't have a lot of time at the moment to give this site the polish it needs, but I figure I'll give this a try and see if I like it. If not, I can always go back to the old-fashioned ways that have served me thus far. Let's hope Blogger doesn't go broke...
Effects of Handbrake presets and RF quality settings across AV1, H.265, and H.264
"Fantastic!" Every once in a great while, I dive deep down the rabbit hole of media formats and the codecs 1 that encode and decode them. Sometimes it's photos, sometimes it's audio, and this time it's video. I'm no expert in these things, but rather an enthusiast who (a) likes to create and organize digital media and (b) likes knowing that the formats I'm choosing are going to meet my present and future needs. In the past few months I've been adding Blu-ray movies to my media server. I've relied on H.264/AVC as my video format for a long time (more than a decade, maybe?), but with H.265/HEVC now pretty mainstream and AV1 emerging, I figured it was time to refresh my knowledge and get to know how these different tools might serve me. This is going to be a long post, so I'm going to take a moment here to establish the four considerations I make whenever I'm encoding media, whether it's video, audio, or photos. The four consider...