A's Video Converter. H.265 and HEVC.

I encoded the trailer that you linked. I used all default settings. I'm on Beta 2 of A's. I doubt if that makes a difference though. It took 57 seconds to encode and it was ~90 fps.




General
Complete name : C:\Users\cagey\Desktop\hd_other_avatar_trailer.mp4
Format : MPEG-4
Format profile : Base Media / Version 2
Codec ID : mp42 (mp41/isom)
File size : 93.7 MiB
Duration : 3 min 25 s
Overall bit rate mode : Variable
Overall bit rate : 3 825 kb/s
Encoded date : UTC 2017-01-18 18:00:41
Tagged date : UTC 2017-01-18 18:00:41

Video
ID : 1
Format : HEVC
Format/Info : High Efficiency Video Coding
Format profile : [email protected]@Main
Codec ID : hev1
Codec ID/Info : High Efficiency Video Coding
Duration : 3 min 25 s
Source duration : 3 min 25 s
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : 3 691 kb/s
Width : 1 920 pixels
Height : 1 080 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 16:9
Frame rate mode : Constant
Frame rate : 23.976 (23976/1000) FPS
Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0
Bit depth : 8 bits
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.074
Stream size : 90.4 MiB (96%)
Source stream size : 90.4 MiB (96%)
Encoded date : UTC 2017-01-18 18:00:41
Tagged date : UTC 2017-01-18 18:00:41
mdhd_Duration : 205455

Audio
ID : 2
Format : AAC
Format/Info : Advanced Audio Codec
Format profile : LC
Codec ID : 40
Duration : 3 min 25 s
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 128 kb/s
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Channel positions : Front: L R
Sampling rate : 48.0 kHz
Frame rate : 46.875 FPS (1024 spf)
Compression mode : Lossy
Stream size : 3.22 MiB (3%)
Encoded date : UTC 2017-01-18 18:00:41
Tagged date : UTC 2017-01-18 18:00:41
mdhd_Duration : 205483

Tiberian Did the encode I linked turn out decent? I saw some transition points that could have come out better. I just used the default settings.

cageymaru said:

Tiberian Did the encode I linked turn out decent? I saw some transition points that could have come out better. I just used the default settings.

Click to expand...

Overall it looks decent, but I did notice in a lot of the high motion scenes there are some blocky compression artifacts that you don't see in the original file. But if you were just using the default settings it sets the target average bit rate quite low.

Now that I got this working on my system I want to try a bunch of different encoder settings to see where I can start seeing a difference from the source material. I think you generally want to figure out the best Q factor to use and do it that way instead of using target bit rates, although I'll try both. I'll try to do some of this testing tonight and see how it turns out.

Through no fault of your own, of course, it doesn't look good but again that's my point: the hardware accelerated encoders using GPUs just aren't that good overall. They're designed primarily for speed (duh) and fast transcoding (double-duh) so people can take their DVDs or Blu-rays and crunch 'em down fast for use with devices like smartphones and tablets aka content consumption devices where the best possible quality isn't necessarily the highest priority. It's very watchable - which is the intention as just explained - on devices like smartphones and tablets and even desktops and laptops given you just want something to watch, but when it gets down to the quality issue or for archiving DVD (which ain't that great for quality in the first place and doesn't need extreme quality encoding) and Blu-ray (which definitely benefits from higher quality encodes) to 4K (which absolutely needs HEVC to keep the file sizes down in terms of bitrate and still keep great visual quality) then that's what the higher quality software encoders provide even if it does take much much longer to get the task done.

One thing that immediately struck me was the file size: with HEVC always making the bold claims of "files half the size, half the bitrate, with the same or better visual quality than h.264..." then I'd expect that clip to be much much smaller but that requires some pretty serious tweaking to make such things happen. Here's a great thread with tons of invaluable but sometimes pretty technical info about HEVC and how to wring the best quality from using it:

https://katcr.co/show/community/index.php/topic,310.0.html

You might have to load that forum's main page at:

https://katcr.co/show/community/index.php

and then reload that direct topic link, that forum is acting a bit weird these days so who knows - if you load the main page there's a sub-section in Help and Support for Encoding and that thread is a sticky there.

Anyway, the GPU encoders can get the job done fast, that's pretty obvious, but what also becomes obvious is the glaring inefficiencies they have with respect to the visual quality which is my biggest gripe (and that of many other very serious encoding enthusiasts) even in spite of the speed boost they provide. The hope is that at some point GPU encoding will get better and I mean really better compared to what it creates even now. It took years for an h.264 GPU encoder to get to acceptable levels of quality (and they still can't match the software encoders) so now that HEVC is really taking hold it's got a long way to go before it'll be something that any serious encoding effort would be geared towards.

Of course it's possible that with some tweaks on that A's encoder it could produce some dramatically better visual quality, the only way to discover this is experimentation which is what this thread is all about.

I just have it on the default settings also. Basically I just have it set to AUTO in every box possible. Schmave would do a better job at setting it up or you. It works with AMD, Intel, and Nvidia cards. Give it a try! Use the Beta though.

So I just did some testing with the Avatar trailer linked previously in this thread. I only tried using the different QP settings with everything else on auto. Subjectively, this is what I found (note the original file size is 286 MB):



If I were going to use one of these presets for ripping movies to just watch I would probably use QP 23 as it is a good trade-off between quality and file size. There may be the occasional scene where you would notice some minor artifacting at this setting but overall it looked pretty good to me (and I was really looking for artifacts). Any QP number lower than this will give you better quality but probably isn't worth it from a file size standpoint.

I like using the QP settings instead of target bitrate settings because it allows the encoder to use more bits when needed but still aims for a target quality. I didn't really notice any artifacts in scenes with a lot of motion as compared to the default settings cagey used in the video earlier.

I encoded the same Avatar trailer using microsoft h.265 encoder, no hardware since I'm on a 390x, default settings and it took 57 seconds.

iDealshare VideoGo can convert H.265/HEVC to other video or audio formats or convert video to H.265/HEVC

There are also many other good H.265 encoding software such as Staxrip, VidCoder, Handbrake, etc. Handbrake encodes H.265 video with CPU, while Staxrip and VidCoder allows you to encode H.265 using GPU encoding acceleration.

Sunderlandgreen said:

There are also many other good H.265 encoding software such as Staxrip, VidCoder, Handbrake, etc. Handbrake encodes H.265 video with CPU, while Staxrip and VidCoder allows you to encode H.265 using GPU encoding acceleration.

Click to expand...

Not sure if it's the same thing, but I coded some stuff in staxrip with an AMD gpu and it looked like absolute garbage. Even changing the bitrate settings to be 90% of the original file size, it added nasty artifacts.

Verge said:

Not sure if it's the same thing, but I coded some stuff in staxrip with an AMD gpu and it looked like absolute garbage. Even changing the bitrate settings to be 90% of the original file size, it added nasty artifacts.

Click to expand...

It depends on the program. Pavtube has gpu acceleration for both green and red. I've not used the red yet, no amd gpu atm. But I've used Pavtube with my TXP and it works decently well, encodes look good. Not as good as cpu obviously but we're talking saving a day's worth of time versus 1/20th of the time. For gpu

thesmokingman said:

It depends on the program. Pavtube has gpu acceleration for both green and red. I've not used the red yet, no amd gpu atm. But I've used Pavtube with my TXP and it works decently well, encodes look good. Not as good as cpu obviously but we're talking saving a day's worth of time versus 1/20th of the time. For gpu

Click to expand...

I've used the intel HW encoder and it's pretty fast, and looks lightyears better than amd's.

Now this was beta, and probably a year ago, it might have improved. I'd test some more but then my crypto mining would suffer.

Did some tests with Radeon hw 265 v. intel hw 265. They look similar now, the AMD is so much improved since the last time i used it.