Hi,
i tried a little bit with h265 in handbrake in the last days. Testet several small files, some settings, until i choose one from the web that was recommended.
At least i tried a movie, a bluray from dead pool i have as rip on my drive, around 25GB. With the setting from above i could make a small file (around 3.8GB). When watching the videos on Beamer i can not see a real difference. Is it possible that without big quality loose the size shrinks from 25 to around 4GB???
If that is correct i would think about to convert all my blurays to save a lot of space. It took me around 2.5h to convert the full movie. I use a Core I5-6500 with 3.20Ghz with 16GB Ram under Windows 7.
Maybe some of you did also test with h265 and could share better settings with me or can say if mine are ok. Normally i only rip the discs, i have no experience with encoding them.
How can i check the quality better then just watching them on a beamer/monitor? Are there maybe tool you can recommend?
Thanks for your time and help.
PS: Yes i know i need a lot of CPU Power to transcode the movies to clients that can not handle HEVC/H265, i tried with my sample files and could play 2 Streams without problems. Only i use the server no external use so i know how much streams i need.
The issue is currently not so much with the quality (which is pretty impressive), but with the amount of processing power to play and transcode such content.
If you put h.265 videos on your plex server, you want to make sure that all your clients will direct play, under all circumstances.
not all your plex clients will have this ability
with mobile clients you wonât be able to direct play under all circumstances (bandwidth restrictions)
if you use subtitles, you will too require the assistance of the transcoder sometimes to âburn them inâ
And as soon as the transcoder comes into play, the sh*t hits the fan.
As I said above: just decoding this stuff is cpu-intensive. But then the cpu also has to encode it back to h.264. The resulting cpu load is about 3 - 5 times greater than with h.264 content.
Add to that the relative immaturity of the freely available encoders (image quality problems under some rare conditions) you rather donât want to add h.265 videos to your server just yet.
Of course, if all you ever do with plex is playing videos to a HTPC client in the local network, then go ahead.
I believe that h.265 is pretty much overkill for almost everyone. Few people watching on the vast majority of TVs can tell the difference between it and the âlesserâ formats. I am a firm believer that the quality and therefore size of a video is useless beyond what can be perceived by the target audience.
Just test a few encodes and use the best reasonable one where you can see the difference.
The main advantage of H.265 over H.264 is its higher compression ratio, not the achievable quality.*
But this greater storage efficiency comes at the price of vastly higher computational requirements.
*(actually it supports better color depth and HDR color. But very few content is available in this format and even fewer clients/displays support it, yet)
My opinion is that hard drive space is cheap. It is easy to add drives. It is not so easy to transcode. I typically rip to keep size down to 3-5GB per hour tops and use settings to make sure I can DP to all of my clients (bandwidth not withstanding) in my home. I donât share with anyone else and rarely watch videos remotely (I do listen to music from my PMS though). I would love to cut down file sizes, but it is just not feasible IMHO right now.
I like to store my high quality files in HEVC when possible to save space. I use Nvidia shields so no issues with playback.
I also use the media optimizer function to create a lower 4Mbps file for streaming.
Sure, I could probably use not much more space to store a high quality h264 file, but then streaming would require transcoding everything anyway because of my low upload speed.
Edit I also expect to be able to transcode those files much faster with the Shieldâs hardware acceleration for HEVC. Just waiting for them to allow metadata on external storage to switch from my Mac mini.
I use HEVC, I donât want to encode my files again when h.264 becomes vintage, HEVC is simply the future and the saved space is phenomenal, I saved almost 50% of my hard disk space by going HEVC and the quality is the same (not really better, nor worse) and I wonât complain about it.
For instance, The Big Bang Theory in h.264 720p was 9 GB per season and the quality was not really good.
Now, in h.265 1080p itâs 3.5 GB and the quality is much much better, I watch it in a 47â LED TV by the way.
