I use DvdFab and have tried the latest release to do a couple of bluray 1080p movies in H265, impressive compression... H264 - 8.6Gb, H265 - 2.3Gb. The compression task for my i7-950 is an overnite task, but wow. I'm keen to see Plex support it. It plays back fine with VLC on my Pc, Mac and Galaxy S5.
Does anyone have any advice on settings to use in handbrake for h265? i did an encode last night with a 1080p bluray ripped with make mkv, both into h264 using the high profile default and the h265 default presets and the h265 was less than 10% smaller, which seems to be a much smaller difference than most people are reporting here. I do always preserve the high def audio, which will dilute the difference somewhat, but i was expecting something more drastic
Does anyone have any advice on settings to use in handbrake for h265? i did an encode last night with a 1080p bluray ripped with make mkv, both into h264 using the high profile default and the h265 default presets and the h265 was less than 10% smaller, which seems to be a much smaller difference than most people are reporting here. I do always preserve the high def audio, which will dilute the difference somewhat, but i was expecting something more drastic
You can get a smaller encodes with handbrake using just x264. Just slide the "Constant Quality" up a bit. The higher it is, the smaller the output will be -- but the lower the quality. You can also decrease the size for x264 by changing (increasing) the preset. Same is true for x265, but the CRF ("Constant Quality") settings don't match up between the two exactly, and, AFAIK, x265's rate control is still under construction.
In short, try increasing the CRF ("Constant Quality") and comparing the results. Back it off once you see a noticeable degradation in quality. You could also try changing x265 preset.
x265 is still in its infancy. You'll see larger differences the more you constrain the bit rate, and filter grain/noise, but, IMHO, for quality/archival encodes of sources with film grain that you want to retain, you're better off sticking with x264, for now. x265 can't do much better than x264 when it comes to encoding grain/noise -- in fact, at the moment, it could be worse. x265's psy-rd is still being tuned. I believe x264's psy-rd/psy-rdo currently does a better job at retaining the perception of detail.
What x265 is useful for right now is encoding at very low bitrates, where x264 would normally look terrible, when streaming to the relatively few remote clients that natively support x265. You'll still want an x264 copy for high detail local streams and lower cost transcodes to lower bitrate/profile x264 streams.
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No need to bump this. Its already here:
https://forums.plex.tv/topic/119512-plex-media-server-09916567-new-transcoder-preview/
That said, I wouldn't start encoding your entire library with only x265 just yet.
Has anyone experienced resume not working with the new transcoder? I can stop a movie half-way through on my Roku. When I come back to the movie and select it to resume from the last watched position, it restarts the movie from the beginning. And this happens on several movies that I have tried. I am not using any encoding other than x264 and it did work correctly before the "new" transcoder was implemented.
Now that the iPhone 6 and 6+ support H.265 (if you look under "tech specs" it says "facetime using H.264/H.265"), we could use this support in both the server and the players asap.
Now that the iPhone 6 and 6+ support H.265 (if you look under "tech specs" it says "facetime using H.264/H.265"), we could use this support in both the server and the players asap.
I can see all the excitement about the new iPhone 6
Now that the iPhone 6 and 6+ support H.265 (if you look under "tech specs" it says "facetime using H.264/H.265"), we could use this support in both the server and the players asap.
i read this too. but i'm not taking this to mean that it has support for h.265 because they don't publish any info about the codec limitation. and its not listed with the other codecs in the "Video formats supported:" section.
To me this reads : supports h.265 but only our flavor that we encode, and only when its done with facetime and read back via facetime.
However i have started to encode to h.265 ever since the new transcoder can read them. They look fantastic with handbrake. i truly hope that plex home theatre can direct play them soon. but not holding my breath.
the only reliable players that can currently play them are VLC, MPC-HT, and the beta builds of XBMC. Intel core 2nd gen and newer chips have the ability to assist the decoding of h.265 using SIMD and openCL. its not "hardware" decoding like we are used to with h.264, but i have a feeling its going to be pretty close. https://software.intel.com/en-us/vcsource/tools/media-sdk-clients
However i have started to encode to h.265 ever since the new transcoder can read them. They look fantastic with handbrake.
Unless you have remote (bandwidth constrained) Plex clients that support h.265 directly, or are extremely short on storage space, I do not recommend encoding with only x265, yet. See my above post for more details.
Ahh thats helpful info. I advise against using CQ/CRF for an encode that is for the purpose of "archive" or of "highest quality for the bitrate".
If I may share my process : I do all my encodes with 2-pass encoding (no turbo first pass) and i use the slow preset. Most of them at 12,500 mbits. i do this on both x264 and x265 with the nightly handbrake builds. Give these options i'm getting better/noticeable visual quality, esp in the small details. From what i see, areas that x264 will smooth over retain their detail in x265.
Unless you constrain the bitrate you aren't really doing an apples to apples comparison, for the reasons you mentioned (the internal algorithms are not using the same settings). If you restrict both encoders to the same amount of bitrate, you can really see what you are getting. However, you're right, the more bitrate you throw at either encoder, the closer they get in quality. At some point though, it might make sense to just rip the stream off the blu-ray and just keep it un touched (i do this for my very favorite movies that i own.)
i never use CBR or Constant Quality, the results never look as good at 2-pass. I encode overnight on a dual 6 core workstation at work so i figure might as well throw all i've got at it...
Ahh thats helpful info. I advise against using CQ/CRF for an encode that is for the purpose of "archive" or of "highest quality for the bitrate".
You should ALWAYS use CQ/CRF with x264, unless you absolutely need to fix the encode to a specific sized media (like trying to cram a DVD encode to a 700mb CD). Set the CRF to a lower number if you want to retain more detail. 18 to 20 for high definition will usually be very close to perfect. 16 to 18 is usually good enough for standard def. A crf of 0 is lossless, but would result in a huge file. Too high of a number will result in a nice small file, but a blurry/blocky mess. The higher the resolution, the less your eye will notice what's been thrown away, allowing higher def encodes to tolerate higher CRF.
2-Pass encoding when using CRF is not a good idea. The point of CRF is to use only the bits needed to encode each frame/scene at the requested quality. Complex scenes get more bits, still scenes get less. Adding a second pass to the process won't help, but will hurt. 2-pass encoding, unless you want to hit a specific media size, or you're using an encoder with broken rate control, is pointless.
DOH! oh no! sounds like I have it all wrong! :( :(
well now i have some tests to do. and thats the fun part for me anyway :)
thanks for the tips
Does anyone have any advice on settings to use in handbrake for h265? i did an encode last night with a 1080p bluray ripped with make mkv, both into h264 using the high profile default and the h265 default presets and the h265 was less than 10% smaller, which seems to be a much smaller difference than most people are reporting here. I do always preserve the high def audio, which will dilute the difference somewhat, but i was expecting something more drastic
Use x265 preset of Fast or Medium at a minimum for good compression. I use CQ20 and am happy with it. If you want better quality use CQ 19 or 18. Based on my testing h.265 CQ18 is still 10-15% smaller than h.264 CQ20, with much greater quality. I also re-encode DTS to AC3 Dolby Digital. As the space isn't worth it for me on DTS.
One thing I wish to see is plex to show you which files are h265 like it does with h264 files.
Use x265 preset of Fast or Medium at a minimum for good compression. I use CQ20 and am happy with it. If you want better quality use CQ 19 or 18. Based on my testing h.265 CQ18 is still 10-15% smaller than h.264 CQ20, with much greater quality. I also re-encode DTS to AC3 Dolby Digital. As the space isn't worth it for me on DTS.
It has become much better with release of x265 v1.4 recently as well, so make sure you are using a recent nightly.
One thing I wish to see is plex to show you which files are h265 like it does with h264 files.
It does show already on the infoscreen, the xml-view and a few other places.
If you are using PHT for playback I would recommend to keep the h265 media in a separated library, at least for now.
PHT doesn't support h265 playback in direct play mode (yet) and you have to switch to transcoded mode if you want to see h265 content ;)
Okay. So now we have a handbrake version that actually supports h265. Plex is up!
Okay. So now we have a handbrake version that actually supports h265. Plex is up!
I believe Plex has been supporting h265 for quite a while now -- about a month or so.
I believe Plex has been supporting h265 for quite a while now -- about a month or so.
Only the PMS transcoder.
