The original post: /r/trackers by /u/vaesuis on 2024-12-25 14:08:18.

I read the names of hundreds and hundreds of encoder groups but the variables that characterize video files seem to me to be few enough to have to justify the existence of all those signatures. The ones that come to mind on the fly are for example bitrate, resolution, DV or not DV, SDR/HDR, different types of HDR, some types of audio that I can’t think of right now. I see very often different encoders that have encoded the same movie with the exact same characteristics, maybe with a few gb or mb difference. If encoding processes are more or less universal (judging from the guides floating around), what are the variables that I don’t see? What distinguishes a good encoding from a bad one with the same size and characteristics?

(For the sake of convenience, let’s consider it with the same codec)