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.
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.
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
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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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.
Thank you! Are these settings for Handbrake?
Yes sir, I use Tdarr with Handbrake CLI to batch process everything.
Can i ask what sort of size you’re getting with your settings?
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
For now H.265, but I really hope AV1 support improves in the near future.
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!
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.
Also, av1 is a much smaller file size. In some cases, literally half.
Depending on the original source codec, yes, but h265 can do that as well. For me the nice part is the firefox browser support and increasing device support. h265 seems to be stuck in patent hell and not going anywhere.
x265 no contest, all day every day. Then again we should probably be migrating to AV1 ASAP
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
x265 all the way, it uses less storage but can still look good.
For now its x265. Though later on itll be av1.
