There is no standardized meaning for high-definition, generally the minimum standard is 720p, a progressive HD signal where each frame is sized 1280×720 pixels. Many mid-sized TV sets produced in the early 2000s, known as HD Ready, were capable of 1280×720, 1360×768 or 1366×768. The next evolution step, called Full HD or 1080p, have a frame size of 1920×1080 is common in interlaced or progressive mode.

At first we aimed to produce videos for the entry level High Definition Video, so we choosed a target resolution of 1366×768 pixel. After all, we have a 32-inch television capable only of 1366×768 pixels.

Our main source of videos is the Xiaomi Yi action camera, which records full HD videos 1920×1080 pixels at a variable bitrate of 12.0 Mb/s. So we re-encode the final montage with the following settings:

We can use Avidemux to make the final rendering (re-encoding). For a command line only solution you can consider ffmpeg to perfomr the re-encoding and to make the merge (mux) all into a Matroska container.

#!/bin/sh
TITLE="Balcani, maggio 2022"
ffmpeg \
    -i "video-high-quality.mkv" \
    -i 'audio-music.ogg' -i 'audio-live.ogg' \
    -map '0:v:0' -map '1:a:0' -map '2:a:0' \
    -metadata title="$TITLE" -metadata:s:v:0 title="$TITLE" \
    -metadata:s:a:0 title="Accompagnamento musicale" \
    -metadata:s:a:1 title="Audio in presa diretta" \
    -filter:v "scale=1366x768" -aspect "16:9" \
    -vcodec 'libx264' -pix_fmt 'yuvj420p' -preset 'veryslow' -tune 'film' -profile:v 'high' -level:v 5 \
    -acodec copy \
    "2022-05_balcani.mkv"