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!
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?
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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. 🤷
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.
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.
What are your steps for the reencoding to av1? Do you use ffmpeg? What’s your command & options?
What happened to RARBG? I’m out of the loop
They shut down last month.
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.
tl;dr 264 = 👑