Hello just making a poll, which one do you prefer? personally I prefer x265 but since the rarbg falldown i’ve seen that almost all 1080p rips are in x264, what do you think about that, and do you recommend any place to find more x265 content beside those in the megathread?
Note that H.264 and H.265 are the video compression standards and x264 and x265 are FOSS video encoding libraries developed by VideoLAN.
Important distinction, thanks for clarifying because I always forget!
A lot of comments suggesting AV1 has better compatibility than h265. In my experience the opposite is true. H265 is supported by all of my devices including Plex on my smart TV without transcoding, whereas AV1 makes everything have a fit trying to play it. Am I doing something wrong?
AV1 seems like a more open successor to HEVC/x265 and since it’s quite new compared to that only new devices are just starting to support it through hardware decoding/encoding
Neither. AV1 if available, if not I download a high quality x264 copy and do my own transcode. AV1 is high quality with smaller file sizes, but isn’t very common right now.
Where have you ever found AV1? I’ve literally never once seen it in the wild. It seems awesome though, I would definitely choose that over anything else
It really is awesome. Lots of leaps forward for AV1 recently. It encodes faster than x265 in some situations with so much space saved. It’s still in the early stages, really, and the compression isn’t perfect, but for video streaming purposes, I’ll take it over x265 any day.
It encodes faster than x265 in some situations with so much space saved
on ffmpeg?
I tested it like 6months to a year ago I think, and it had similar storage requirement at similar visual fidelity but transcoding took what seemed 5x to 10x the time/e: for future reference, I’m testing a transfer to transcoding to AV1 instead of hevc
ffmpeg -i /path/to/infile -c:v libsvtav1 -preset 9 -svtav1-params tune=0:enable-overlays=1:scd=1:scm=0:fast-decode=1 -crf 50 -g 240 -pix_fmt yuv420p10le /path/to/outfileThese are a mix of what I read here:
https://gist.github.com/BlueSwordM/86dfcb6ab38a93a524472a0cbe4c4100
and here:
https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/AV1general gist:
preset is encoding speed, higher is faster, this setting gets me a bit faster than what i had my hevc encode set up
tune=0 tunes for being good looking
fast-decode lessens cpu use on decode
crf 50 seems fine for my use
-g 240 changes keyframe insertion to every 240 frames
-pix_fmt yuv420p10le gives 10bit color depth which helps with dark scenes and doesn’T cost much space
Because of this post, I reencode a BD rip I made using handbrake to see how small the output file would be. I used the 4k av1 fast profile, but changed the audio tract to passthrough. Holy crap, 44gb down to 1.5gb. what black magic is this?
I have a personal Jellyfin server, and I usually reencode from x264 to AV1. Though if it’s a matter of choosing a source, I always go for x264 for the least compression.
What are your steps for the reencoding to av1? Do you use ffmpeg? What’s your command & options?
I’d like to have the hard drive space for x264, but as I don’t I prioritise 265. If I do download 264 I then use tdarr to convert it to 265 myself.
Curious, Im pretty new to with encoding, but wouldnt going from 264->265 (lossy to lossy) cause further quality loss? I know you arent supposed to do that with audio, did it hurt your video quality at all?
Yes, but I prioritise hard drive space over quality. There’s occasionally artifacting and whatnot, but I don’t have the space to download everything in super high quality.
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All my content is converted to CPU encoded x265. Size is MUCH smaller and quality better than GPU encoded x265. My preference is to get remux copies of the content and then encode it myself.
Could you share your encoding settings?
Let’s see if this works:
I don’t keep 4k content, I find that 2k encodes for the stuff I really want at high fidelity is enough with Nvidia upscaling (Nvidia shield). Plus surprisingly some of my 2k files are no larger than 1080p.
Can i ask what sort of size you’re getting with your settings?
Thank you! Are these settings for Handbrake?
Yes sir, I use Tdarr with Handbrake CLI to batch process everything.
What happened to RARBG? I’m out of the loop
They shut down last month.
Maybe something isn’t right in my setup but I see a noticeable difference in quality between the two. If I have two different files of one movie, one H265 and one H264, I find the H264 picture looks better most of the time
That’s not really a measure of the codec, but rather a measure of the encoder. A lot of x265 encoders are awful. They go with x265 for the smaller file sizes and over-compress it, similar to the old YIFY. Groups that use x264 already aren’t as concerned with file size (if they were, they’d use x265), and choose settings that optimize for quality.
Do you know any good x265 encoders on top of your head?
Tigole. QxC and UTR. On 1337x
H265 is objectively superior in just about every way UNLESS you’re trying to play it on hardware that doesn’t support it. The only reason to use H264 is for broad compatibility.
also its not just pure “compatibility”, but I had a time when I played vids to my TV over an old laptop (from around 2015). Worked like a charm. But some x265 vids went into full-on stutter mode in scenes where a lot of stuff was happening… was more a nuisance than a dealbreaker, but still, preferred x264 versions if I could get them
Sounds like your TV isn’t fully compatible with x265. You can get around that by using a modern streaming stick that supports it.
The issue is more political than technical. Hopefully AV1 will fix that.
Pretty sure it’s just more of a hardware age issue. Smart TV makers don’t put much effort into their firmware, so if they don’t support a codec now they probably won’t support it ever. Devices made before a certain year probably won’t ever support H265. I suspect we’ll run into the same thing with AV1, unfortunately. It’s another objectively superior codec that will have compatible issues. 🤷
Shit, I like HEVC in theory for the compression especially but it’s copyrighted bullshit or whatever.
I use Plex with lifetime pass on my QNAP NAS and it has to hardware transcode HEVC to a playable format because of said copyrighted bullshit.
It doesn’t affect me that much unless I’m trying to jump around on the media as it will need to load. The other thing is that you can have Plex save transcodes but that obviously gobbles up disk space.
tl;dr 264 = 👑
