Will Converting 1080 HD WMV videos to 1080 HD MP4 decrease their quality?

Franklin

Yugituber
Joined
Dec 23, 2012
Messages
1,170
Reaction score
320
Age
34
Website
awesomecardgames.com
Channel Type
Youtuber
I'm considering converting my WMV to MP4 to save space on my hard drive while I save cash for a new external hard drive. Will this decrease the videos' quality? If so then by how much? I do not want to lose a lot of quality because it may ruined my viewers' experience.
 

astrotelecast

Liking YTtalk
Joined
Feb 19, 2015
Messages
80
Reaction score
25
I think that MP4 compresses the image so that stuff like text will be less defined. I also find that my colours get slightly changed.
 

echoraven

I Love YTtalk
Joined
May 18, 2015
Messages
710
Reaction score
271
Age
58
Location
Brooksville, FL
Channel Type
Youtuber
If you have a DVD burner, perhaps you can save the files on DVDs to free your hard drive. I will be doing this soon until I can upgrade my 1TB to 3TB... Then I'll probably have to array my backup. :(
 

NalaNosivad

Member
Joined
Apr 9, 2015
Messages
12
Reaction score
4
Age
35
It absolutely will, no question whatsoever. You're going from one lossy format to another. You could encode to a ridiculously high bitrate so you don't lose as MUCH quality, but that would defeat the purpose of doing it to save space.

You could either 1) re-encode to H.264/mp4 and lose some quality to save some space, or 2) leave them as they are and zip/rar them into an archive to save probably a few megabytes at most.

You should definitely just use H.264/mp4 to begin with, though. It's just better, and YouTube likes it more.
 

FurryNomNoms

Deadpan Overlord
Joined
Sep 6, 2015
Messages
635
Reaction score
199
Channel Type
Gamer
Everytime you encode the video it diminishes the quality, but if you keep the bitrate the same the change will be minimal.
 

NalaNosivad

Member
Joined
Apr 9, 2015
Messages
12
Reaction score
4
Age
35
Everytime you encode the video it diminishes the quality, but if you keep the bitrate the same the change will be minimal.
That's a close enough rule when using the same codec, but absolutely not when you're transcoding from one codec to the other.