Encoding Video

[Thurmus]

It seems some of the TV and Movies for download are now being encoded in H265 and none of my A/V devices support it.

I want to re-encode them in H264 but with the same quality and size as the H264 versions of the shows for download.

I have tried Googling various terms but I can't seem to find an easy way or explanation.

I have tried some of the Handbrake presets but they are ending up more than double the size they used to be.

Does anyone have a site that may have some good settings to or software to try?

Thanks

[kurdt_the_goat]

What size should they end up? Im guessing the newer codec has better compression, so you might not be able to avoid the file size increase while retaining quality. Im not really sure but either way I'd imagine your best bet is using ffmpeg on the command line. Try googling "ffmpeg h265 to h264". You may already have it if you're using handbrake, but might need extras to do the best conversion.

[DarkHyren]

I found this guide which has some explanations on how to convert H.265 (also called HEVC in some circles) down to the much more widely used H.264 format.
http://www.pavtube.com/convert-h265-to-h264.html
And as kurdt mentioned it's likely that the file size will increase, though you can reduce that increased file size slightly if when you convert you convert to MKV rather then AVI as MKV has a better compression rate.

[Thurmus]

I understand it will be less quality but I am happy with the quality of videos where a 1 hr episode of something was about 350mb in H264.

Has anyone ever seen a guide on how to encode the same way cappers do?