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!
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.
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/outfile
These 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
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.
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. 🤷
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.
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.
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?
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 = 👑
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