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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
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.
amen. I just discovered AV1 so that seems cool as far as space saving goes
AV1 we should have more hardware acceleration in the future. AVIF is also promising.
For now its x265. Though later on itll be av1.
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.
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
AV1 is the shit. Still doesn't have broad support on consumer devices yet, but it will come.
H.265. The file size difference is impressive, and without a noticeable loss of quality, if any.
AV1 when available for everything other than 3d content which is ideally x265.
Honestly it blows my mind that x264 is still as popular as it is.
x264 is still popular because lots of active devices (mainly TVs and smartphones) still don't have native support for x265.
For now, H.265, but I really hope AV1 support improves in the near future.
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?
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.
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
Search for the user Infinity on TorrentGalaxy
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.
For some unknown reason Infinity strips off the subtitles from the releases. I like a good subtitle track with my release...
H.265 tends to struggle with older, film grain heavy content in my experience, but for newer stuff it wins hands down.
X265, obviously. AV1 is getting more and more common, so that'll be my next stop.
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.
HEVC Matroska forever ♥
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
Strange, confusing asymmetry in your title.
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.
For acquisition - I'll take what I can get.
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 HEVC, because my media server can transcode it quite easily and it takes way less space than h.264
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
That's not really a measure of the codec, but rather a measure of the encoder. A lot of x265 encoders are awful. They go with x265 for the smaller file sizes and over-compress it, similar to the old YIFY. Groups that use x264 already aren't as concerned with file size (if they were, they'd use x265), and choose settings that optimize for quality.
My server has a hard time with x265, they constantly stutter when I try to play them through jellyfin
X265 all day long. Changed out most of my rips and gained terabytes of space back with no loss in quality.
It's amazing being able to hold an entire season of a show in the space that just a couple episodes at 264 would have used.