I think this was a pretty dumb experiment, and the outcome was to be expected. There will always be some sort of noise, pixels aligned differently etc., in a p

I think this was a pretty dumb experiment, and the outcome was to be expected. There will always be some sort of noise, pixels aligned differently etc., in a production like a tv series, and expecting the encoded output to be identical/matching on a blocklevel is pretty naive to say the least. I did some experimenting using ZFS deduplication on MPEG2 files, where I encoded hundreds of MPEG2 dvd-sized videos, where 90% of the material was identical (the last 10% was affected by applying different watermarking techniques to the footage), and got some decent deduplication ratio (x1.2:1 or so).. But ZFS deduplication is expensive in memory/SSD, and it was definitely not worth it.