How to get better quality converting MP4 to WMV with ffmpeg?

Question

I am converting MP4 files to WMV with these two rescaling commands:

ffmpeg -i test.mp4 -y -vf scale=-1:360 test1.wmv
ffmpeg -i test.mp4 -y -vf s         


        

Answer 1

You can simply use the -sameq parameter ("use same quantizer as source") which produces a much larger sized video file (227 MB) but with excellent quality.

ffmpeg -sameq -i test.mp4 -y -vf scale=-1:360 test1.wmv

In newer versions of ffmpeg flag '-sameq' has been removed. To achieve similar results one should use 'qscale' flag with 0 value:

ffmpeg -sameq -i test.mp4 -qscale 0 -vf scale=-1:360 test1.wmv