Game of Thrones is notoriously difficult to encode. Season 1 was shot on film (Arriflex 435) and carries a distinct film grain.
With x264 , you often use a high ref frame count and lookahead to handle grain. With libvpx , the strategy is different. If you aren't careful, libvpx tries to smooth out that grain to save bits, resulting in a "waxy" look on faces like Sean Bean’s rugged features. game of thrones season 01 libvpx
It looks like you’re searching for in a specific video codec format: Libvpx (the open-source VP8/VP9 video codec used in WebM and MKV containers). Game of Thrones is notoriously difficult to encode
Here is my journey into the world of royalty-free encoding. With libvpx , the strategy is different
The bandwidth savings were impressive. The original Blu-ray rips were hovering around 30Mbps. The VP9 encodes sat comfortably around 2.5Mbps.
ffmpeg -i input.mkv -c:v libvpx-vp9 -crf 30 -b:v 0 -lag-in-frames 25 -row-mt 1 -g 240 -an -pass 1 -f null /dev/null && \ ffmpeg -i input.mkv -c:v libvpx-vp9 -crf 30 -b:v 0 -lag-in-frames 25 -row-mt 1 -g 240 -c:a libopus -b:a 128k -pass 2 output.webm
If you are building a media server that serves web clients (especially if you are using something like Plex or Jellyfin that supports transcoding to VP9 on the fly), libvpx is a beast you should definitely tame.