Best video and audio format for small file size with very unnoticeable quality depreciation

Question

I need to bring down disk space of my file-sharing website suggest me an audio codec and video codec which works with FFMPEG and can reduce file size with little or no loss in quality . Thanks.

Answer 1

H264 compressed video with aac audio is a commonly used combination, however you should be aware that recompressing any media file will always yield to a loose of quality, regardless of the codecs being used.

Here is a post on how to generate such a media file with ffmpeg. An example from that page says:

Two-Pass encode using the fast preset. Two-pass encoding is usually used when you want a specific output file size:

ffmpeg -i input -pass 1 -vcodec libx264 -preset fast -b 512k -threads 0 \
    -f mp4 -an -y /dev/null && ffmpeg -i input.avi -pass 2 -acodec libfaac -ab 128k \
    -ac 2 -vcodec libx264 -preset fast -b 512k -threads 0 output.mp4