Ask HN: Share your FFmpeg settings for video hosting

I am working on a website that has video hosting capability. Users can upload video files and i will generate multiple versions with different qualities or just audio, thumbnails and things like that.

I have chosen the mp4 container because of how widely supported it is. To prevent users having to fetch whole files, i use the fast start option, where the container's metadata is written at the beginning of the file, instead of at the end.

Next, I have picked h264 codec because of how widely supported it is. VP8/VP9/AV1/x265/x266 are certainly better but the h264 software encoding is often beating hardware encoding due to highly optimized and time-proven code and supported hardware. And the uploaded videos are already compressed, users won't be uploading some 8k raw videos where most advanced codes would be useful for preserving "quality".

For audio, i have picked opus codec. Seems like good value over others. Not much else to add.

I run the ffmpeg to convert video with command like this:

ffmpeg -hide_banner -loglevel error -i input.mp4 -g 52 -c:v h264 -maxrate:v vbr -bufsize vbr -s HxW -c:a libopus -af aformat=channel_layouts=7.1|5.1|stereo -maxrate:a abr -ar 48000 -ac 2 -f mp4 -movflags faststart -map 0:v:0 -map 0:a:0 output.mp4

where vbr is video bitrate like 1024k(1mbps), abr is audio bitrate like 190k and HxW is video dimensions in case of resizing.

I wonder how are folks that handle video encoding process and generate their videos?

How did you pick your settings, what issues have you encountered and any tips you can share are certainly appreciated.

Quite a niche segment when it comes to operations and not being merely consumer/customer.