That's the basic idea, yeah. It falls apart in a couple places, e.g. when the cut or fast-fade goes to a very cheap frame like a mostly solid color, and it may

That's the basic idea, yeah. It falls apart in a couple places, e.g. when the cut or fast-fade goes to a very cheap frame like a mostly solid color, and it may not detect stuff like whip-cuts (since a whole chunk of frames are expensive), but so many scenes in so much of media has single-frame cuts that it's well within that "good enough" range. And for dynamic encoding like this: when it's wrong, it's not visually worse in that scene than choosing that sub-par encoding for the entire movie, which has the same "choose the best encoding" problem as individual chunks have. I assume it'd be relatively rare for it to result in anything worse than a one-shot strategy. --- ffmpeg will let you easily do frame-to-frame-diff logic that lets you chop videos into scenes, for example: https://video.stackexchange.com/a/30701 https://video.stackexchange.com/a/30701 I'm not sure how much it handles compressed-frame differences, but it shouldn't be too hard to build around it. Just might be a bit beyond bash-friendly.