I recently started building a movie/show collection again on my home NAS.
I know that generally H.265 files can be 25-50% less bitrate than H.264 and be the same or better quality. But what’s the golden zone for both types? 10 Mbps for a 1080p H.264 movie? And would it be like 5 Mbps for H.265 1080p to be on par with H.264? What about 4K?
For file size: would it be 25GB for a 2 hour 1080p movie to be near or at original Blu-Ray/digital quality?
“Same as original” is not possible
Why not go with a constant quality setting in the encoder instead of bitrate and filesize limitations?.
Thats what I do I feel CQ of 18 is indistiguishable from the original.
Bonus TIP when transcoding for static Use like storing and filesize reduction. always use a CPU never a GPU if you are after smallest filesize.
If you want constant quality, it’s better to also encode using quality-based encoding instead of bitrate-based encoding. It allows rh encoder to save space where there’s a non-complex scene and use more in more complex ones. It might, for example, be able to encode the few seconds of back screen at the begging of some movies in 50KB or something similarly small where bitrate-based encoding uses the full bitrate generating multiple MB.
This way you can easily get a 4K encode down to 4-8GB. Animation compresses incredibly well without percievable quality loss. Anything with grain will quickly balloon in size. Something like Star Trek (2009) with its insane amount of noise is more than twice that size if aiming for VMAF >95.
I think you can safely remove about half the native bitrate and be perfectly within the range of “indiscernible”. I don’t like to think of H.265 as a means to use a lower bittrate. I like to use it to retain more quality at sensible rates. 25-30mbps is fine for most content, with a more prized movie getting a bit more overhead. Deleting non-used tracks and the likes is also a plus.
How long is a piece of string?