Possible to pass custom options to ffmpeg to reduce output file size?

[xj25vm]

I have Motion working with several Hilook cameras at 1280x720 and 5fps, with continuous recording saved in mp4/h264. I am struggling to reduce the output file size while maintaining quality to a usable level when the footage is re-encoded by Motion. At the moment on 50% movie_quality, the resulting files are 50MB (megabytes) per minute. If recording in passthrough from cameras, it is more like 5MB / minute, with similar visual quality as the 50MB / minute file encoded by Motion through ffmpeg. Reducing movie_quality much further below 50% degrades the output quality too much. I have tried to manually re-encode the files with ffmpeg using -crf 24 - and I am getting 4MB / minute with almost the same quality as the original 50MB / minute files - so it looks like ffmpeg is capable of doing it. Is there anyway to pass custom arguments to ffmpeg (from Motion) to output smaller videos while maintaining quality please - or should I go down the route of movie_extpipe?

[tosiara]

Try using extpipe, with it you can tune more settings and use various encoders

[xj25vm]

Thank you for the reply. I have found in the code in ffmpeg.c where the parameters are passed to ffmpeg, and changed "ultrafast" to "slow" for the preset argument and recompiled. This does reduce the size of the output video, but really hammers the cpu. It looks like I will have to go back to using passthrough recording, and add OSD/captions to the video footage from the camera, instead of in Motion.