How can I achieve the best overall FLV quality with FFMPEG?

Question

I\'m looking to accomplish the best quality FLV with the lowest file size. After all, isn\'t that everyone\'s goal? These videos will be streamed if that makes any difference.

Answer 1

By default flv defaults to 200Kb and with the qmax being as high as 30 (since you're not overriding it) it'll probably be producing output near that. You can fix this by either:

• Setting qmax to a lower value forcing the quality control to up the birate to meet the requirement.
• Upping the bitrate with -vb 400k

On the test video I just tried -qmax 10 gave acceptable output. Using qmax and qmin to set the lower and upper acceptable quality is the preferred way.