This post assumes you have a basic understanding of how encoding a video works, and what the popular codecs are. There are many great guides on this if you want to learn about it in detail. In short, CRF compresses a video based on visual quality, rather than targeting a specific bitrate/file size. x264 is an older incredibly widely supported codec for viewing video. x265 is the newer version of x264, and is supported by any modern video player. AV1 is a codec that was announced in 2015, and had commercial hardware support released to the public in June 2022. It is the new hotness to x264’s old reliable.
I recently came across the desire to compare various compression levels for the two most popular video codecs to the most popular up and coming one. I’m a simple guy, there’s a couple of good research papers for this specific topic, so my test setup is not going be rigorous. At best, it will be representative. I wanted to see just what a difference a codec can make on a video file size using comparable quality levels. On to the setup!