The original post: /r/piracy by /u/RyanGarcia2134 on 2025-03-04 18:48:39.
I had The Walking Dead full 11 seasons pirated from around 2 years ago, it was the biggest torrent i could find which was 1.6tb. (It's my favorite show and i love to watch it in the highest quality i can) This was when i was first getting into pirating and i just assumed the biggest the best. A couple months ago i found out about x265 encodes and how their size to quality ratio is better than x264. I started downloading x265 encodes as i noticed a lot of my movies were x264, and almost all the movies i redownloaded in x265 were around the same size but the quality was worlds better.
Then i noticed The Walking Dead encode i had was x264, and i wanted to compare to a x265 encode because 1.6tb was a bit too much for me. I compared a couple episodes to loads of different x265 encoders on private trackers and public torrents and managed to find a x265 encode that was almost identical quality to the 1.6tb x264 encode i previously had. The 1.6tb x264 was slightly higher quality (It had some more grain and looked a tiny bit sharper), but it was way more worth it to change to the x265 as it came out to 282.3gb. So i basically saved myself like nearly 1.4tb just from moving from x264 to x265.
Even with The Sopranos i had a 1tb x264 encode from RiCK and found a 200gb x265 encode from IME and the x265 IME encode is actually slightly higher quality, saving me 800gb and giving me higher quality results. I wish i knew about HEVC/x265 sooner. I doubt anyone even cares but i just wanted to tell someone how cool i think this is, and maybe it will help inform other people who aren't clued up like i was on how much more superior x265 is.