Encoding for fastest decoding with ffmpeg

Question

Encoding with ffmpeg and libx264, are there presets or flags that will optimize decoding speed?

Right now it seems that videos transcoded with similar file sizes are decoded at very different speeds using Qtkit, and I was wondering whether there are options for encoding such that the decoding speed will be maximal.

Answer 1

There is --tune fastdecode in x264 (or -tune fastdecode if using ffmpeg) if you want optimize for decoding speed at the cost of quality/compression efficiency. In libx264 tune setting is available as one of the params for x264_param_default_preset.

Answer 2

I've used this in the past:

-b (to remove B Frame calculations)

-maxrate 8M (I find this is important because sometimes the averages have a large distribution in bitrate and so if you set 8M as an average, you may still find 15M peaks)

-tune fastdecode (already explained above)