HEVC/H.265 Encoding

OliverQueen

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 17, 2019
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I am seriously running low om storage at the moment across my Plex servers. I haven't got funds at moment or in the foreseeable to buy larger drives so looking at converting from H.264 to H.265. I know that both the RTX 2070 & the Intel iGPU of the i7 8700 in my desktop are both very efficient H.265 HW encoders, but I am a little stuck with encoder settings for the codec within Handbrake. I have been converting at present using the Nvidia GPU and the settings left at same resolution, 35CQ on the quality slider & 128kbp audio bitrate in stereo AAC (not bothered about 5.1 or more than 2.1 speaker setup as majority of time the streams are to my iPad). I am also thinking about doing the same converting of files stored on the other servers of which one is using a pair of quad core 2.66Ghz (1333FSB) Xeon's, 56GB DDR2 RDIMM's & a 512MB Nvidia Quadro 350 (not HW supported for h.265 encoding according to Nvidia's site). Obviously not going to get anything more than cold treacle performance from this machine so not really wanting to use it unless last resort. The other server is my old i7 4770K, 32GB DDR3 & Nvidia 4GB(3.5GB) GTX660 (again not hardware supported for h.265 encoding). I have checked & the onchip iGPU of the 4770K supports Intel's QuickSync hw encoding protocol so wondering what settings would give the best trade off between quality & file size without taking forever to encode the source files. My main question is suggestion to the settings for it. Should I stick with the same as I am using on the RTX card or have I got some more wiggle room to lower the CQ setting to make the file size even smaller? At present a 720p 45 minute tv show encoded to h.265 is using between 150MB to 190MB. A 1080p 2hr movie is sitting at around 800MB. I am not seeing any pixellation during fast moving scenes or on dark backgrounds like some heavily compressed/very low quality files show on a larger panel.

Any suggestions other than spending money on bigger drives or faster GPU's?
 
Omg 800mb for a 2 hour movie. Bro your eyes are completely fucked.


Doing 2pass on my 8 core ryzen, a 2 hour movie takes me about an hour to encode. 15 minutes on ATI hw, but you can't do 2 pass. The biggest problem i have, is plex doesn't support x265 worth a crap, and my nas can't transcode fast enough, so i never use it.
 
I use CPU encoding, because I'm picky about quality. I use handbrake Constant Quality level 20 for action films and 19 for everything else. On h.264, 2 hour movie, this got me around 5GB. For h.265, it's down to around 3GB.

800mb for a 2-hour movie? You must be blind.

The handbrake default constant quality of 22 for BluRay looks like crap to me, but would produce a better video output than yours.

And there's no need to do 2-pass anymore: you can get smaller file sizes without all the guesswork using Constant Quality.

If you're only doing it once, why compromise it with GPU acceleration? I can encode multiple movies a night on my ancient 4790k.
 
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You ask for advice & get abuse.... This site used to worth visiting for advice when required but seems like since Kyle & majority of the staff left, it turned to crap. Please delete my account Mods.
 
You ask for advice & get abuse.... This site used to worth visiting for advice when required but seems like since Kyle & majority of the staff left, it turned to crap. Please delete my account Mods.
If you don't notice a difference now, then go ahead and keep dropping your bitrate until you do.
Most people want to have fidelity as the highest priority and compression comes after that. Compression is your highest priority and it seems like you already know what you want and like.

Also, I wouldn't call anything that has been stated abuse either. What has been stated has merely been essentially that you don't notice quality loss. People have also given you their numbers as well as suggestions for settings. Which I would say is direct responses to your question on balance when having greater consideration for quality over compression.
If you don't want to be a part of the site. Just leave. You don't need a goodbye post. Nor do you need to have your account deleted. Without being rude, seriously, if this is your reaction then any amount of teasing IRL must be debilitating for you.
 
You ask for advice & get abuse.... This site used to worth visiting for advice when required but seems like since Kyle & majority of the staff left, it turned to crap. Please delete my account Mods.


You seemed to be getting along fine without any more commentary from me. What did you want, a handjob?

I told you what encoding settings I used, and what was important for me. You seem perfectly capable of producing unwatchable versions of your movies, so they should be fine for you. What else was there to discuss here?
 
You ask for advice & get abuse.... This site used to worth visiting for advice when required but seems like since Kyle & majority of the staff left, it turned to crap. Please delete my account Mods.
Please go get some lube. Apply liberally, you're going to need it for daily life too.

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On topic, you're encoding video for a reason. You're using HEVC/h.265 as your target for a reason, and it seems that you're flirting with even lower quality output.

At this point it seems that the decision will likely get pushed upstream, i.e., do you actually need to keep this stuff on the Plex server? Does it need to stay available? Can it be reconstituted if you deleted some of it until you expand storage??
 
No... he's simply doing it right. But it probably also takes him a whole night for 1 movie.
Compression isn't magic. You give something up in order to have smaller file sizes. Most notably image quality. But you also certainly will not have any form of positional audio, definitely no Dolby Atmos, nor even 320kbps level mp3s (likely you're at 160kbs stereo audio if you're lucky, 128kbs if you're not). You're also significantly more likely to start having other issues like macro blocking, which essentially is resolution loss.
With newer forms of compression you can get smaller file sizes while maintaining fidelity but you give up a massive amount of playback ability in post. Because then you're essentially forcing your computer to have to decode a huge amount of compressed data in order to achieve playback.
There's a reason why BD's are the size that they are - one, obviously for quality reasons, but two it requires very inexpensive chips for playback. No compression means no processing overhead.

Frankly, I'm at the other end of the spectrum. I'd rather have my video files be 4k, have good audio, and sit somewhere between 12-20GB. Most people don't even have massive storage needs. I shoot photos and videos for a living -frankly 20GB for a movie is small (my SD cards are 128GB each and they regularly can be full after a day of shooting). It's certainly a lot smaller than shooting uncompressed video and the storage requirements associated with that. Anyway, that's missing the point; the point is most folks even if they are trying to store a big film collection could do so for relatively cheaply. You can get a 12TB easy store for <$200. At 20GB a pop that could store 600 movies. At 10GB, of course it would double that at 1200 movies. Even if your collection is extensive, a few drives could easily cover virtually any amount of movies you could want to have lying around. Granted at 1GB, that would allow for 12,000 movies to be stored - but that's what I mean, who has that many movies AND has a problem with storage space (unless you're an extreme pirate)? And more to the point, film is a visual and auditory medium - at a certain point everything you see and hear is just a distant echo to what a less compressed picture can get you.

There are generally no large files other than ripped video that consumers use. $200 is a relatively minor investment to have all your video files ripped in a good quality codec with a decent bitrate and also not have everything look and sound like garbage. But hey, maybe I'm crazy. Maybe people don't have 4k TV's or a decent set of headphones if not a HTIB.
 
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Compression isn't magic. You give something up in order to have smaller file sizes. Most notably image quality. But you also certainly will not have any form of positional audio, definitely no Dolby Atmos, nor even 320kbps level mp3s (likely you're at 160kbs stereo audio if you're lucky, 128kbs if you're not). You're also significantly more likely to start having other issues like macro blocking, which essentially is resolution loss.
-snip-
I was under the impression they were talking 1080p, not 4K. And i'll assume you also are talking about 10bit 4K?

On the other hand, we compress multiple 100GB-200GB RAW 8K recordings per day down to 10-20GB h.265@L6 90fps 4:2:0 (so no HDR)
Well, It takes more than a day to complete 1, there's just a couple going on at any given moment.
GTX1660 and newer play those just fine. (and Navi)

Even the new Quest 2 (XR2) plays them natively, even could do 4:2:2 better than the decoders on the GPUs
The display however doesn't support HDR.
 
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I do Handbrake constant bitrate 14,808kbps x264 video and 192kbps AAC audio (I don't do nor care for a surround setup, only ever have and will use 2.1 soundbars), so movies come out to around 15GB for 2 hours. If I do A/B you can notice it's just a tad softer than the source BR, but grain and everything is preserved nicely, and it looks better than even Vudu HDX or any other streaming service. Takes me about 6 hours to encode a single movie with all my settings on my 3570k. I just set it to go overnight and then auto shutdown when the encode is done.

Aside from the obvious space savings, this also gives me broader device compatibility for native playback (this was really a problem when I used Xbox 360 as a WMC extenders around the house - which is why I had to settle at 15mbps as that was the max it could handle - and is honestly less of an issue now with my 918+ NAS and Plex QuickSync). But most importantly, I don't have to worry about subtitles (forced subs only) - either playback issues or just remembering does this movie have forced subs do I have to enable it, etc. They're burned in at time of initial encode and thus always auto display when needed as they're part of the video itself now. This latter reason is why I still prefer to encode my collection, moreso than the space saving aspect.

I'm waiting for my new build (Zen 3 5900x) and Handbrake to get 10bit/HDR support (I might have to move to Staxrip if this doesn't happen soon enough) - and then I'll start doing 4K BR encodes @ 44,808kbps x265 and still 192 AAC audio.
 
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