How to improve the quality of converting MP4 to WMV using ffmpeg?

Question

I convert the MP4 files to WMV with these two scaling commands:

ffmpeg -i test.mp4 -y -vf scale=-1:360 test1.wmv ffmpeg -i test.mp4 -y -vf scale=-1:720 test2.wmv 

I also tried:

 ffmpeg -g 1 -b 16000k -i test1.mp4 test1.wmv 

However, the generated .wmv files are “ blocky and grainy, ” as you can see here in a small section of the video screenshot:

These are the sizes:

 test.mp4 - 106 MB test1.wmv - 6 MB test2.wmv - 16 MB 

How to increase the quality / size of the resulting .wmv files (the size of the .wmv files is not a concern)?

Answer 1

You can simply use the -sameq ("use the same quantizer as the source"), which creates a much larger video file size (227 MB), but with excellent quality.

 ffmpeg -sameq -i test.mp4 -y -vf scale=-1:360 test1.wmv 

Answer 2

Instead, consider the following command (some obsolete commands in the final answer section):

 ffmpeg -i test.mp4 -c:v wmv2 -b:v 1024k -c:a wmav2 -b:a 192k test1.wmv 

LITERATURE

• List item https://askubuntu.com/questions/352920/fastest-way-to-convert-videos-batch-or-single

Answer 3

One thing that I found after many disappointing attempts to improve the final quality was that if you do not specify a bitrate, it will use a rather low average. Try -b 1000k for the starting point, and the experiment increases or decreases it until it reaches the desired result. Accordingly, your file will be larger or smaller.