what does cropping do? I tried it once and it wasn’t good. I don’t want any cropping for sure, that makes a mess on my system and the movies look weird
This is what I am trying now:
[HEVC MKV AnyStream NVidia]
Description=HEVC in MKV hardset to use NVidia.
order=ffmpeg,handbrake
DisableEncoderReordering=true
ffmpeg-general=-threads 0
ffmpeg-video=-c:v hevc_nvenc -vf yadif=0:-1:1 -preset hq -rc constqp -rc-lookahead 60 -spatial_aq 1 -temporal_aq 1 -nonref_p 1 -cq 26 -map 0:v -sn
ffmpeg-audio=-c:a ac3 -map 0:a
ffmpeg-audioac3=-c:a copy -map 0:a
ffmpeg-audio=-acodec ac3 -map 0:a
ffmpeg-audioac3=-acodec copy -map 0:a
ffmpeg-ext=.mkv
ffmpeg-audiodelay=skip
ffmpeg-UsingHardwareEncoding=true
ffmpeg-DisableSoftwareEncoderFallback=true
ffmpeg-VideoOptimized=true
Cropping removes the black bars if there are any.
You have ffmpeg-audio and ffmpeg-audioac3 in there twice. Remove one instance of each.
I definitely don’t want cropping. The black bars are not only fine but necessary. They add no size difference to the video file but subtitles get messed up and in Emby the videos look funny.
I don’t know how those got in there twice as I directly copied and pasted that profile from a post here from you months ago…LOL
I may try adding these instead:
ffmpeg-audio=-acodec ac3 -ab 160k -map 0:a
ffmpeg-audioac3=-acodec ac3 -ab 256k -map 0:a
In movies I find no reason not to use compression…but I am not sure if these settings are VBR or CBR because VBR is superior.
I will make adjustments to the profile after this conversion is done. I have done this movie with MCEBuddy like the profile was before, with FFmpeg Batch with the audio and subs taken from the MCEBuddy encode muxed in…and the one I’m doing now…so that will be the most accurate comparison.
Thanks so much…I feel I may have light at the end of this long tunnel. I just received 3 4TB drives this morning so maybe I can finally get all my movies encoded and then backed up onto these extra drives.
Good luck! I hope it works for you. It’s all about personal preferences so you just tweak things as you need to.
I learned a lot about ffmpeg so it was fun to try and figure it out how to get it working for you. I was getting crazy good fps with my profile.
This encode is flying…and the reason I made these changes is because I have a lot of horror movies with dark scenes and movement which results in the haloing. I then found that even with H.264 at normal quality and HW Acceleration the haloing was there but less pronounce. This profile makes the files not as small as the default HEVC in MCEBuddy but smaller then the H.264 in MCEBuddy…about halfway in between or %20-25 larger then the default HEVC but the haloing is gone. The issue is older movies are kind of grainy, and add in dark and movement and you get haloing with compression…now I have the grainy appearance back but that is fine because it is there in the TS file so it is innate and not going away…and I’m old so the grain doesn’t bother me kind of like scratches and pops in music of old as that was the only option we had back in the day.
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Do you know what the difference is between these two sets so I know which one to keep?
ffmpeg-audio=-c:a ac3 -map 0:a
ffmpeg-audio=-acodec ac3 -map 0:a
ffmpeg-audioac3=-c:a copy -map 0:a
ffmpeg-audioac3=-acodec copy -map 0:a
-c:a is the same thing as -acodec
Basically -c is codec and the :a is telling it that it’s for audio where as -acodec means audio codec. -c:a just takes up less characters.
Are both telling ffmpeg to siimply copy the audio streams?
Yes
It’s broken into two separate lines. The first one (-audio) is for handling any audio that is not ac3 in the source and the second (-audioac3) is how it should handle ac3 audio in the source file.
I honestly have found that audio takes up such a small portion of the file size in the grand scheme and I want quality audio in my playback because I’m watching them on a TV with a nice surround sound system. My tolerance for not so good video is much higher then my tolerance for not so good audio. 
You’re right, the size difference is pretty small my biggest issue is although I have a surround system it isn’t set up due to massive headache running the wires and the fact that my girlfriend and the children are in bed by 8 so I have no time to enjoy it anyway…maybe when I extend my garage to build a shop and an apartment over it for ME…then I can have surround and watch it all night. LOL
BTW, it is amazing how fast the encoding times are now that the de-interlacing has been moved onto the GPU instead of the CPU
@weitogo did we get your original issue solved? Sorry, we sort of hijacked your thread there. 
From all the information we have presented in this thread I’m sure he has enough info to understand the issue. I’m pretty sure he was using software encoding which will definitely make a smaller file at the sacrifice of taking 4 hours+ to encode on my machine as opposed to 30 minutes or less with HW Acceleration. My one and only software encode with HEVC made the movie almost fit on a CD as opposed to 2.5 times larger using the GPU
Would there be any special trick to munging this to use AMD instead of NVidia? I’m trying to get Handbrade to compress things as well as MCEBuddy is and I can’t seem to get the settings down pat or find the right preset. Thanks!
Unfortunately I don’t have an AMD card to test with and the handbrake cli won’t output the encoder or presets if it doesn’t detect the cards from what I can tell.
But you can collect that information by opening a command prompt and navigating to where you have MCEBuddy installed and going into the handbrake folder and type the following:
HandBrakeCLI.exe --help
Then look through the output towards the top there is a section that lists the available video encoders it will look something like this:
Video Options ----------------------------------------------------------------
-e, --encoder <string> Select video encoder:
x264
x264_10bit
qsv_h264
nvenc_h264
x265
x265_10bit
x265_12bit
qsv_h265
qsv_h265_10bit
nvenc_h265
mpeg4
mpeg2
VP8
VP9
theora
--encoder-preset <string>
Adjust video encoding settings for a particular
speed/efficiency tradeoff (encoder-specific)
--encoder-preset-list <string>
List supported --encoder-preset values for the
specified video encoder
--encoder-tune <string>
Adjust video encoding settings for a particular
type of source or situation (encoder-specific)
--encoder-tune-list <string>
List supported --encoder-tune values for the
specified video encoder
It’s the -e, --encoder values that we are interested in. It will also vary based on what your card specifically supports. The next step is to get a list of presets available for that encoder by typing in the following:
HandBrakeCLI.exe --encoder-preset-list
But replace with the AMD encoder.
There are then numerous other tuning that can be done that will be encoder specific but you can likely use what I have below as a starting point.
Just replace the value and the value with the findings from above.
[HEVC MKV hardware handbrake]
Description=HEVC in MKV using hardware encoding in Handbrake.
order=handbrake
DisableEncoderReordering=true
AllowAllCopyRemuxing=true
handbrake-UsingHardwareEncoding=true
handbrake-DisableSoftwareEncoderFallback=true
handbrake-general=-v=2
handbrake-video=--comb-detect=Default --decomb=Default --auto-anamorphic -e <encoder --encoder-preset <preset> -q 26 --cfr
handbrake-audio=-E copy --audio-copy-mask ac3,eac3,truehd,dts,dtshd,mp3,flac --audio-fallback ffac3 -R auto
handbrake-audioac3=-E copy -R auto
handbrake-ext=.mkv
handbrake-audiodelay=skip
handbrake-UsingHardwareEncoding=true
handbrake-DisableSoftwareEncoderFallback=true
AllowAllCopyRemuxing=true
Good luck in your MCEBuddy profile tweaking adventures.
If you’re using the stock profiles, MCEBuddy will automatically detect the AMD card and use it if possible. If you have multiple graphics cards, you can tell it to use only the card you want from the Conversion Task → Expert Settings page