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.
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.
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.
- ∟⊔⊤∦∣≶ ( @luthis@lemmy.nz ) English2•1 year ago
Agreed. I’ve had problems playing h.265 on other devices, streaming, etc, where 264 would work fine.
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 just AV1 but for images. Doesn’t seem to relate much with movies
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
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) English23•1 year ago
If it’s patent-encumbered, it doesn’t exist as far as I’m concerned.
For now its x265. Though later on itll be av1.
Wow I never heard of AV1 before, it sounds really promising!
For some reason plex doesn’t support it yet, though jellyfin does at least
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
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.
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?
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
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…
On his own releases he’s started embedding the subtitles which is nice… but yes i admit a lot of his rarbg uploads are missing the subs… I generally remux the rarbg ones with the english sub track so it’s annoying when they aren’t there… I’ve had good luck grabbing them from subscene though.
DivX using since 2004, no regrets
- The Chad DivX/XviD user
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.
People need to upgrade their shit
Remember how long DivX/XviD hung on for, it’s all down to device compatibility.
From a place of ignorance: why is x265 better for 3d and not AV1?
Strictly because the tooling doesn’t exist in an easy enough way to go from blu-ray -> full-sbs encode at this point.
I’m constrained by knowledge to only use tools like BD3D2MK3D to create full-sbs encode in x265 which I watch in VR.
If AV1 were an option in this tool I’d consider it, but the additional encoding time might not be worth it to me as the person actually encoding the files.
If anyone has knowledge of F-SBS or F-OU AV1 content or tooling please let me know as I’d be glad to learn.
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?
4K x264 rips (the few that are out there) are hilariously big compared to the same quality 4K x265 rips
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.