Fuente: WIPO "circular economy" In video compression, the quantization parameter (QP) determines the compression level and bitrate of videos. Block-level QP adaptation can improve video encode efficiency, but determining suitable QPs at the block-level without incurring significant overhead is not trivial. To address this concern, QP adaptation at a QP unit having one or more blocks can be performed using one or more filtering distortion values which are already calculated for the one or more blocks by a motion compensated temporal filter (MCTF). One or more minimal distortion values are used in calculating a distortion metric, which is then used for determining the quantization parameter to be applied to a QP unit. The one or more minimal distortion values are also used for determining a size of the QP unit. Different thresholds may be applied to the distortion metric, depending on whether MCTF is on or off.