H.265 · CRF 25 · 1080p · Opus · MP4

The scenario

Cloudflare Stream video processing pipeline. H.265 at CRF 25 with fast preset for real-time transcoding at scale (thousands of concurrent uploads), Opus for modern web audio, MP4 for DASH/HLS delivery. Speed over compression ratio.

The answer

Video Codec	H.265
CRF	25
Resolution	1080p
Audio	Opus
Container	MP4
Preset	fast

The command

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v libx265 -crf 25 -preset fast -c:a libopus -b:a 128k output.mp4

Why

Cloud transcoding services like Cloudflare Stream rarely use presets slower than "fast" because the compute cost per minute of video scales linearly with encode time. At $0.05/min GPU cost, "slow" vs "fast" adds $0.15 per video.

Play

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