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?
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.
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.
x265 is just objectively better than x264. I'm not sure what's to poll. It really comes down to the encoder themselves which ends up a better result. x265 has a minor draw back in that it's new and older things don't naturally support it and a decent draw back in that it takes more CPU power to decode the stream for playback. Other than that though x265.
The various quality though comes from inexperienced or lazy encodes for both formats being available. I have such a pet peeve for someone taking a x264 encode and uploading it in x265 with like a 2% file size reduction and talk about how much better it looks. And the general downloader eats it up because 'x265 gud' to a certain degree. It hurts because then that typically becomes all you can get and no conversion is truly lossless so even re-encoding them myself can take a lot of work to get the reduction without quality loss. I've seen x265 480p encodes that end up with bigger files sizes than if you encoded the shit in AVI, because they seem to think low CFR and 265 is instant quality at a "better" size. If you take the time to really dial in the settings, run it at a slower speed, and understand what type of content you're encoding you can get an incredibly high quality small file. But that takes a decent amount of knowledge and a lot of patience. That's what really sets apart good encoders/releases.
Idk the fix. It doesn't help there's also people convinced a larger file size has inherently better quality. Like seeing a bluray 1080p rip in x265 that's a larger file than an entire bluray disc can hold drives me up a wall because usually it's one of the more seeded files. Like obviously people uploading and tagging 4k lossless files know what they are providing, those files are needed for the proper encodes to eat up.
But RARBG tagged releases were amazing quality. You typically had to go up a few gigs for similar quality from another release. Pahe can really nail some tv shows. Few other encoders back in the day. YIFY/YTS are amazing for the size, but you are giving up some quality. But you can't beat a 1.5gig movie that is better than streaming quality at times.
The first time I grabbed a 1080 265 and it was almost half the file size of a 264 I had and the quality was visually the same, I knew I could never go back.
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?
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?
Since having a device that can natively watch x265 I only get that format now. I’m not sure of the quality is better vs x264 but for TV shows the disk space reduction makes up for any quality loss. Movies might be different and it depends on the film but I’m still only getting 1080p rips so again maybe the quality is that important compared to 4K?
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.
As a cinematographer, h.265 is superior in every way. That being said I don't mind watching other formats, as long as their is a reasonable bitrate I'll even watch 720p content
They are re-uploading a lot of RARBG 1080p x265 releases but have are also releasing new movies / tv shows under their own tag with very similar quality and file sizes.
I wish 1080p h265 web-dls were more common. No lossy encoding and multiple streaming services have 1080p h265 available. But I have only seen like a couple release groups do it and most torrent sites don't have them
I prefer av1 to h265. h264 can play on anything, and while its debatable whether av1 is better than h265, av1 is supported in all browsers and gaining hardware support rapidly.
10 bit HEVC allows for some crazy good compression ratio. I love it. Put it into an mkv with chapters and externalized series op and ed I can remove and ignore - perfect.
8 bit AVC mp4 for compatibility - if that's the goal.
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
Ah yes, you see these are number terms that indicate how videos are encoded. I absolutely understand how to feel with this post and are worthy of participating in the smart discussion in the comments.
imposter syndrome aside, left is a nice grid, right is a really really bad attempt at drawing a golden ratio.
Sure left is better to maintain average quality. Why are people talking about converting to one and then the other? Why is the golden ratio one not symmetric!
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.
My old ass computers sadly can't handle h265 well so I tend to stick to h264. Moreover, my beamer cannot handle 4K or HDR so that makes more sense overall
I just finished moving all my media to x265 and saved 7TB in the process. Quality looks plenty good to me but I always start from a remux if I can. Totally Worth it for the extra space.
I prefer 265 for efficiency BUT there's a certain nostalgic warmth with 264 over-compressed fuzz. Same deal as with vinyl records. It was such an improvement on xvid back in the day....
x265 doesn't work for some hardware scenarios for me (e.g. files served up by UMS from my PC don't play properly on LG TV or using the standard media player on Roku). So I have to use x264 for anything that I won't be watching on a computer or via Stremio.
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.
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.
I'm on the same opinion as you, I'm super sad we lost all HEVC encodes just for 1 and 2 GB for a movie is amazing, and it is 1080p which is perfectly enough. There is nothing which will replace that for a while, I can imagine.