Low-bitrate videos can grow when re-encoded, so a quick ffprobe check flags them first

A developer built a small script that uses ffprobe to read header data and compute bits per pixel per frame, then labels each video SKIP or ENCODE before a batch re-encode. The threshold of 0.10 comes from an earlier test of 36 files, where all low-bpp files below 0.08 grew after re-encoding. On five public WebM clips from Wikimedia Commons, the script flagged only one file, a 1080p moose clip, which grew to nearly 2.8 times its original video size. The other four clips shrank by between 17% and 65% when re-encoded with x264 at CRF 23. The script runs entirely locally and only reads metadata, so it can screen a whole folder without modifying any files.