arch1t3cht

What you NEED to Know Before Touching a Video File

Hanging out in subtitling and video re-editing communities, I see my fair share of novice video editors and video encoders, and see plenty of them make the classic beginner mistakes when it comes to working with videos. A man can only read "Use Handbrake to convert your mkv to an mp4 :)" so many times before losing it, so I am writing this article to channel the resulting psychic damage into something productive.

If you are new to working with videos (or, let's face it, even if you aren't), please read through this guide to avoid making mistakes that can cost you lots of computing power, storage space, or video quality.

arch1t3cht

UPDATE: This page has now been moved to / incorporated into the JET Encoding Guide, in the hope that that that page can slowly grow into a more comprehensive encoding guide.

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So this is supposed to be a list of encoding-related resources together with some very basic instructions. Kind of an encoding analogue to fansub.html. This is not a full guide on encoding.

Since this page is starting to get linked elsewhere, I should also make clear that it mostly comes from (a person adjacent to) the JET community. In particular, it's written primarily from the perspective of anime encoding. Still, most parts will hold up equally well for live action and other areas.

This guide may seem fairly technical. Partly this is because I have a background in pure mathematics and this is how I learned the material, but partly it's just because encoding is cursed and co