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?
So basically, quality can differ across them but most of the time you’re gonna be happy with how it looks. But where it makes a bigger difference is file sizes. That’s the main reason why I care
I prefer whatever codec my hardware supports. Currently Pi 4 does both your options so I don’t care which. x265 has slightly smaller file size for the same quality wish is nice.
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.
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.
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?
AV1 is very efficient (around twice as good as h264), but a filesize that low was almost definitely because the default encoding settings were more conservative than the ones used to encode the blu-ray. The perceptual quality of that 1.5gb file will be noticeably lower than the 44gb one
I’ve recoded a bunch of x264 to AV1 and routinely gotten file sizes that are 10-15% of the original file size (a little more than 1/10th the original size)
What I’ve found is that source content often has a lot of key frames. By dropping key frames down to one per 300 or one per 150 frames (one per 10 or 5 seconds for 30fps) and at scene changes, you can save a LOT of space with no loss of quality. You do give up the ability to skip to an arbitrary point in the content, however. You may have to wait a few seconds for rendering to display if you scroll to an arbitrary point in the content.
If you’re just watching the content straight through, no issues. I set CRF to achieve 96 VMAF and I can’t tell any difference in quality between the content with that setup.
I had one corpus of content that I reduced from 1.3 TB down to 250 GB after conversion.
Unfortunately, only the most recent TVs have AV1 playback built in, and the current Fire sticks, Chromecast don’t have support for playback from a LAN source. I’m hoping the next crop of Chromecast and similar devices get full support, I’m assuming it’s just a matter of time until AV1 decoding is included in every hardware decoder since it’s royalyy-free.
Maybe in the future AV1 will even get faster with the better implementations.
It’s a great codec just sad that the older Raspberry Pi’s just hate x265.
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.
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. 🤷
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
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.
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
general 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
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.
It’s not like a ton of people have compatible hardware anyway. It’ll eventually become more common as more uploaders can encode and downloaders can decode.
As far as I know most uploaders prefer software encoding for the best result. Even with the most advanced encoder (e.g. SVT-AV1) and the latest hardware, that becomes a taxing task with AV1.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
For now H.265, but I really hope AV1 support improves in the near future.
I’m a bit of a layman in regard to video codecs, what’s the actual difference?
So basically, quality can differ across them but most of the time you’re gonna be happy with how it looks. But where it makes a bigger difference is file sizes. That’s the main reason why I care
I prefer whatever codec my hardware supports. Currently Pi 4 does both your options so I don’t care which. x265 has slightly smaller file size for the same quality wish is nice.
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:
1080p Encoder Settings
2k Encode Settings
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.
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?
AV1 is the shit. Still doesn’t have broad support on consumer devices yet, but it will come.
Yeah doesn’t work on my Roku lol so back to x265
AV1 is very efficient (around twice as good as h264), but a filesize that low was almost definitely because the default encoding settings were more conservative than the ones used to encode the blu-ray. The perceptual quality of that 1.5gb file will be noticeably lower than the 44gb one
I’ve recoded a bunch of x264 to AV1 and routinely gotten file sizes that are 10-15% of the original file size (a little more than 1/10th the original size)
What I’ve found is that source content often has a lot of key frames. By dropping key frames down to one per 300 or one per 150 frames (one per 10 or 5 seconds for 30fps) and at scene changes, you can save a LOT of space with no loss of quality. You do give up the ability to skip to an arbitrary point in the content, however. You may have to wait a few seconds for rendering to display if you scroll to an arbitrary point in the content.
If you’re just watching the content straight through, no issues. I set CRF to achieve 96 VMAF and I can’t tell any difference in quality between the content with that setup.
I had one corpus of content that I reduced from 1.3 TB down to 250 GB after conversion.
Unfortunately, only the most recent TVs have AV1 playback built in, and the current Fire sticks, Chromecast don’t have support for playback from a LAN source. I’m hoping the next crop of Chromecast and similar devices get full support, I’m assuming it’s just a matter of time until AV1 decoding is included in every hardware decoder since it’s royalyy-free.
x265 because all of my devices support it. Once they release a Nvidia Shield TV like device that supports AV1 I’ll change once again.
Maybe in the future AV1 will even get faster with the better implementations. It’s a great codec just sad that the older Raspberry Pi’s just hate x265.
If the original encoding is 265. Then 265
If its a high quality 264 encoding, then I’ll transcode to 265
Otherwise I stick to 264
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.
Agreed. I’ve had problems playing h.265 on other devices, streaming, etc, where 264 would work fine.
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. 🤷
Except h265 is only ever used for 4k outside piracy. This is because Codec licensing issues.
Once it’s conceivable to do so, it would make sense for Netflix to announce it won’t make new Netflix ports for TVs without AV1.
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.
x265 all the way, it uses less storage but can still look good.
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?
This is accurate as you’re making a copy from a copy. Better to download a remux and then convert that.
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.
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.
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/AV1
general 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
For now its x265. Though later on itll be av1.
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
Same size?
H265 should always be smaller for comparable quality to an H264 file due to the better compression (as shown in OPs image)
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!
amen. I just discovered AV1 so that seems cool as far as space saving goes
I just wish we had more AV1 releases
It’s not like a ton of people have compatible hardware anyway. It’ll eventually become more common as more uploaders can encode and downloaders can decode.
As far as I know most uploaders prefer software encoding for the best result. Even with the most advanced encoder (e.g. SVT-AV1) and the latest hardware, that becomes a taxing task with AV1.