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!
x265 no contest, all day every day. Then again we should probably be migrating to AV1 ASAP
I think it has to reach a bit more device saturation before encoders jump to it. But yeah AV1 is much better for everyone. Having AOM there to work on it and protect it is a good bonus. Pirates and Netflix on the same team there lol
I guess I’ll have to see if my TV really can decode AV1 then, as my nvidia shield definitely won’t
The trouble with AV1 is that it’s about a decade behind h.265 in terms of hardware support. Most people aren’t upgrading their gpus every single generation, so by the time AV1-compatible hardware starts to see significant market share, it’s pretty likely that h.266-compatible hardware will be on the market as well.
Of course, there’s also software encoders; but benchmarks of current software encoders put av1 anywhere between 50-1000x slower than x265 for comparable quality and bitrate.
It’s definitely cool that people are working on a royalty-free video codec, but h.265 is the undeniable king for the time being.
I’d agree with you except that my LG CX already supports AV1. Now I don’t know the numbers, but I do know these LG OLED TVs are pretty popular
No arguments about it being a good TV, but the vast majority of people do not have shiny new LG oled TV’s. Hell, most people are still using old 1080p lcd’s without any smart TV features, and the people who have got new TV’s over the past few years tend to skew heavily towards buying relatively cheap 4k TV’s that may not have any smart TV features (after all; if i already have a roku/apple tv/chromecast/etc that covers all of my streaming needs, why would I pay a huge premium to get these features a second time?)
yeah but don’t most streaming services already provide multiple formats depending on client compatibility? HEVC is cool and all and AFAIK pretty much a requirement for anything UHD, but if Netflix et al can instead send AV1 (like they could if I ran netflix directly on my TV) then that would further reduce their bandwidth requirements. I don’t know how long it will take for AV1 to achieve enough market penetration for it to be worth it to them, but here’s to hoping it’ll be sooner rather than later
Netflix rolled out av1 support for a handful of Samsung smart TV’s about a year and a half ago, then kinda shoved the project under the rug and never mentioned it again. My guess is that the added costs of having to store their entire library twice plus having to re-encode everything made it uneconomical. Besides, av1 doesn’t have a bandwidth advantage over h.265; all of the comparisons that Google likes to use to show off the codec are av1 vs h.264, which is pretty sneaky and misleading imo.
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. 🤷
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.
Agreed. I’ve had problems playing h.265 on other devices, streaming, etc, where 264 would work fine.
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.
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.
AV1 we should have more hardware acceleration in the future. AVIF is also promising.
AVIF is a great format, but I’m still salty over what Google did to JPEG XL. If at least Firefox adds support I will use JPEG XL on my websites with AVIF as fallback. Oh yeah, and then we have MS Edge that doesn’t even support AVIF yet lol.
Now with SVT-AV1, its debatably as fast or faster than HEVC
AVIF is just AV1 but for images. Doesn’t seem to relate much with movies
For now its x265. Though later on itll be av1.
Wow I never heard of AV1 before, it sounds really promising!
I just heard about it a few minutes ago and it seems really nice too. Especially with all the space it saves.
I was trying to start getting some movies in 4k to take full advantage of my new 4k tv other than gaming, but honestly the sheer size of 4k films has me staying with 1080 for at least a little more
For some reason plex doesn’t support it yet, though jellyfin does at least
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.
Yeah, I don’t get the poll. Why would anyone use x264 I don’t know!
The general pattern is that 4k will be x265 and 1080P encodes with DV / HDR10 need to be x265.
But non HDR / DV 1080P and below is x264.
That’s what the encoders on the cabal trackers are doing.
If it’s patent-encumbered, it doesn’t exist as far as I’m concerned.
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?
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.
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
x265. I do my own rips usually.
Do you use handbreak to do it? And what settings? Is it something that needs to be played around with to see how output is, so doing small segment to determine what is ideal?
No, I use Simple x264/x265 encoder in combo with MeGUI (do the avs in MeGUI, the encode on Simple x264/x265 encoder).
Yeah, you have to play around with it to see what quality suits you. And yes, that takes a looooot of time. Doing small segments will give you a general idea, but the end result may greatly differ in movies with a lot of fast moving action scenes. So, it’s best to just encode the whole thing (2 pass, I use the very slow preset, but I’m nuts), view the results and just go from there.
H.265. The file size difference is impressive, and without a noticeable loss of quality, if any.
I’ve actually had a season of Better Call Saul in h.264, which was 10gb and another one in AV1, which was 1gb and the AV1 seemed to look better
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
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Looks like it glitched and posted your comment multiple times, at least on my end it looks like it.
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For now, H.265, but I really hope AV1 support improves in the near future.
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?
I am 100% in on 265, I’ve gotten my Plex users to upgrade to newer devices or they can have transcoded video.
I would love to migrate to AV1 in a few years, but that’s a ways out.
4K x264 rips (the few that are out there) are hilariously big compared to the same quality 4K x265 rips
