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?

69 points

Note that H.264 and H.265 are the video compression standards and x264 and x265 are FOSS video encoding libraries developed by VideoLAN.

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19 points

Important distinction, thanks for clarifying because I always forget!

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55 points

x265 no contest, all day every day. Then again we should probably be migrating to AV1 ASAP

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15 points

I think it has to reach a bit more device saturation before encoders jump to it. But yeah AV1 is much better for everyone. Having AOM there to work on it and protect it is a good bonus. Pirates and Netflix on the same team there lol

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3 points

I guess I’ll have to see if my TV really can decode AV1 then, as my nvidia shield definitely won’t

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2 points

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.

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2 points

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

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2 points

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?)

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47 points

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.

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6 points

The issue is more political than technical. Hopefully AV1 will fix that.

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11 points
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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. 🤷

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4 points

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.

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2 points

Agreed. I’ve had problems playing h.265 on other devices, streaming, etc, where 264 would work fine.

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1 point

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

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2 points

Sounds like your TV isn’t fully compatible with x265. You can get around that by using a modern streaming stick that supports it.

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41 points

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8 points

amen. I just discovered AV1 so that seems cool as far as space saving goes

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7 points

I just wish we had more AV1 releases

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4 points

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.

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2 points

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.

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30 points

Neither. AV1 if available, if not I download a high quality x264 copy and do my own transcode. AV1 is high quality with smaller file sizes, but isn’t very common right now.

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14 points

Where have you ever found AV1? I’ve literally never once seen it in the wild. It seems awesome though, I would definitely choose that over anything else

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13 points
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It really is awesome. Lots of leaps forward for AV1 recently. It encodes faster than x265 in some situations with so much space saved. It’s still in the early stages, really, and the compression isn’t perfect, but for video streaming purposes, I’ll take it over x265 any day.

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7 points
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It encodes faster than x265 in some situations with so much space saved

on ffmpeg?
I tested it like 6months to a year ago I think, and it had similar storage requirement at similar visual fidelity but transcoding took what seemed 5x to 10x the time

/e: for future reference, I’m testing a transfer to transcoding to AV1 instead of hevc

ffmpeg -i /path/to/infile -c:v libsvtav1 -preset 9 -svtav1-params tune=0:enable-overlays=1:scd=1:scm=0:fast-decode=1 -crf 50 -g 240 -pix_fmt yuv420p10le /path/to/outfile

These are a mix of what I read here:
https://gist.github.com/BlueSwordM/86dfcb6ab38a93a524472a0cbe4c4100
and here:
https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/AV1

general gist:
preset is encoding speed, higher is faster, this setting gets me a bit faster than what i had my hevc encode set up
tune=0 tunes for being good looking
fast-decode lessens cpu use on decode
crf 50 seems fine for my use
-g 240 changes keyframe insertion to every 240 frames
-pix_fmt yuv420p10le gives 10bit color depth which helps with dark scenes and doesn’T cost much space

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4 points

how is the support for AV1 on devices? can most play it back? does plex support it?

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6 points

rav1ne and dav1nci on 1337x

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2 points

Good looking out. Been using primarily usenet and haven’t seen anything pop with AV1 encoding.

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1 point

1337x, search for AV1. There’s not that much right now, but I’m starting to see more of it.

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