I have various video files as MKV, including some high-def (1080p) with FLAC audio. These can be played fine on a several-years-old PC with a mid-range graphics card (using mpv/ffmpeg), but when I tried to play them on a Kindle Fire HD8 (using VLC for Android) it caused it to choke.How can I reencode them such that the lower-powered machine can play them? I assume this will lead to a decline in quality, but I doubt I would notice on the smaller screen anyway. I already have ffmpeg installed and hope to just use that, but if it's easier I can install some other tool. Presumably there are multiple tradeoffs to be made here; it would be nice to have some idea of the options. (I can also post more details about the precise encoding of the files in question, if that would be useful; at the moment I don't know what would be relevant.)
How best to reencode video for lower-performance playback?
video;ffmpeg
I ended up doing something like:ffmpeg -i input-file.mkv -vcodec h264 -s:v 1280x800 -acodec copy output-file.mkvOf note: using -vcodec copy doesn't work, since that bypasses the decode/encode altogether and thus doesn't allow applying filters. Downscaling the video to this degree ended up shrinking the files dramatically and solving the problems with performance. I also tried further restricting the bitrate with -b, but that caused a noticeable quality hit while not making any difference to playback performance.