Guide to HEVC/H.265 Encoding and Playback: A better, more efficient format

[Evernessince]

H265 Handbrake settings in this article work very well. Fairly fast conversion at 18 minutes for a 2 hour video and results look very nice achieving about an 80% file size reduction. Your results may vary depending on your hardware. It's a winner!

Yeah, that's not bad at all. I encode blu-ray to near lossless .264 and it takes all night on a 5820k. This is on the slowest encode option. 1/4 the file size and I can't tell the difference between the source and the finished product.

 

[SirGCal]

My problem is that everything I have has H.264 hardware support. Batteries last longer, CPU works easier, etc. So with my entire library either in pure ISO form or H.264 form, everything can play my MKV collection (isos not so much but I double up, HDD space is cheap).

I am not worried about space. I have two servers right now and getting ready for a 3rd. 12/24TB now, new one will be 36 or more. They sit there using almost no energy and serve up what I need when I need it. But being a cripple sometimes bed-bound, I have little choice. I can't even get my disks and put them in the drive most of the time... This way everything is just on tap. Click it, watch it. enjoy. But I'm also not going to stress about the storage of my library and I'm surely not going to re-rip my entire library just to save some space. Not worth it. I'll stick with H.264 also for current ripping duties until well after H.265 has been adopted by hardware also.

 

[marcvanh]

The encoding presets (medium, fast, etc) do *not* affect output quality - only output file size and encode speed. That is, whether you encode using preset "slow" or "fast" or whatever - the output is visually the same! The presets are there to tell the encoder how much time to spend compressing each frame. Output quality is affected by things like CRF level or setting a specific bitrate...

 

[veLa]

I work for part-time for a local TV station as a live sports production crew member, and I just can't see HEVC being adopted our station any time soon. It might offer similar quality at lower bitrates, but the lack of hardware support at this time means that it's barely a blip on our scope.

 

[Mark Besher]

Objective visual analysis of the provided PNG files show H264 (x264 specifically) is still the quality leader and HEVC implementations continue to suffer from blurring and loss of detail.

HEVC is for those who 1) do not care much about quality and 2) prioritize bitrate much higher than visual fidelity.

VQM Filename
==== ========
0.00 TBBT 1 Original.png
0.55 TBBT 1 H264 Custom.png
0.65 TBBT 1 H264 Default.png
0.67 TBBT 1 HEVC Medium.png
0.69 TBBT 1 HEVC Slow.png
0.74 TBBT 1 HEVC Faster.png
0.87 TBBT 1 HEVC Nvidia CQP.png
1.15 TBBT 1 HEVC Ultrafast.png
1.18 TBBT 1 HEVC Nvidia VBR Low Bitrate.png

Ranked by objective visual quality using "TBBT 1 Original.png" as reference.
Lower Visual Quality Matric value is better, meaning perceived more similar to the original.

Unfortunately the author failed to take screenshots of the *same* frame in the other sequences (off by one), making quality comparison impossible for the other segments.

 

[Technosense]

I work with video for a living so the quality difference was immediately noticeable to me. H264 is clearly better to my eye. It's a bit odd there wasn't a simple attempt to encode a show at equal quality and compare encoding differences. This almost seems like someone really wanted to say "H265 is the winner".

 

[rvnwlfdroid]

Very nice article. After a little bit of testing to verify all my existing devices can play the H.265 compression. I could easily see using this on a number of my TV shows. As with most I can see a difference between the 2 and I don't think I would be willing to take the hit on movies.

 

[hkhan1989]

I work with video for a living so the quality difference was immediately noticeable to me. H264 is clearly better to my eye. It's a bit odd there wasn't a simple attempt to encode a show at equal quality and compare encoding differences. This almost seems like someone really wanted to say "H265 is the winner".

I agree.
I wish HEVC's quality was near identical, if it were I would save GBs worth of storage. But unfortunately it is not. I'm not talking about zooming in or using a magnifying glass here, I can see square boxes of blurred pixels in heavy action sequences, which ruins the experience for me.

HEVC is the way forward in terms of storage space, it is ridiculously lower, but not at the expense of quality.
Until they can address this, it is a no go.

Also, last I checked, HEVC is heavily reliant on CPU, only new GPUs are able to decode it, which means older hardware will have trouble playing HEVC material.

 

[Jibberish18]

Really impressive. The quality is nearly as good as the original with a fraction of the size as a penalty. And even if you see a difference (of course you do when you have a picture posted for you with a handy slider to compare) will you spot the difference when watching a show with movie objects on a television you're sitting 6+ ft away from? I don't think so then again I don't have eagle eyes like I used to.

 

[fktech]

HVEC in Handbrake is terrific!!!

Lack of stand alone players is a killer.

Computer based software players like VLC and SMPlayer work great for HVEC.

 

[RusselZiskey]

Great article!
If you are already pirating movies and serials, do you really care about HEVC royalties and patents?

No, but if you care about quality, you won't believe this "half the size for the same quality" bullshit. If you can't see how poor HEVC files look compared to H.264 files that are twice as big, you should probably just go back to VHS.

 

[Dr Dave]

Hi,

Doing my own tests comparing h264 vs h265 and I found keeping the quality settings the same the latter was only %30 smaller when compression a DVD 720p rip. I thought x265 was suppose to deliver %50 reduction in size at same quality setting?

Thanks

 

[kolia]

Very nice and impressive article. AFAIC, I will never tradeoff quality versus anything else (4K Sony projector, large screen). When I finished to build a fanless high power HTPC (including NVidia GTX950), I did some tests using Staxrip using video card hardware encoding. At that time (8 months ago) I was not satisfied with the quality of the output and found Staxrip painless to use. As some others said in rather colorful langage, I would say that as usual marketing material surpasses the facts.

 

[Dr Dave]

I have a question for the writer of the article. Was wondering if they could comment on their h.264 settings on page 2? Its a little different than the standard Film setting for H.264. Also if there was a guide for H.264 that would be great...

Thanks.

 

[Vonsid]

Thanks for the articles, very educationnal. Still I don't get why in the "HEVC Versus H.264 Encoding" part, lower bitrate is said to be better ? Isn't a higher video bitrate better ?

 

[cliffordcooley]

Thanks for the articles, very educationnal. Still I don't get why in the "HEVC Versus H.264 Encoding" part, lower bitrate is said to be better ? Isn't a higher video bitrate better ?

I don't know what you are referencing, but being able to get lower bit rates for the same quality recording is better. Especially when sharing/streaming across a limited bandwidth connection such as low speeds and data caps.

 

[Vonsid]

I don't know what you are referencing, but being able to get lower bit rates for the same quality recording is better. Especially when sharing/streaming across a limited bandwidth connection such as low speeds and data caps.

Ok, thank you. I was refering to

Following these articles I encoded the same files in h265 with handbrake and Staxrip to compare (with equivalent quality settings) and got higher bitrates with Staxrip. I thought that was better, but I was wrong, thanks for explaining why.

 

[daniel0320]

I have done my own test with a 10 min 1080p clip, and the HEVC ultrafast deliver smaller files than HEVC medium, why could this be? ultrafast looks a little worse than medium, but if I chose a higher constant quality RF, the quality si the same than medium, but the file size is smaller anyway...

 

[DelJo63]

H265 is a WEB standard - - be advised, stick with W3C standards and you will to better in the long run.

 

[Svendeven]

Has anyone tested what's best export settings for 360 video to FB? I use premiere pro, I am not worried about the size of the files or how long it takes to render them. My only concerned is the quality and that it works great to look at facebook. file is a 360 video 3840x1920 29,97fps 3 minutes long.
H264 or H265? Bitrate CBR or VBR and which numbers are the best in terms of quality and playback?

 

[MikeS3000]

Love the article! Today I just discovered Intel QSV on my i7 7700k. I used handbrake to encode some h.265 Blu-ray mkv files and it encodes in 1/3 the time. Quality looks good to me. I'm no expert though. CQ rf values of 23 on both. Standard h.265 settings same as this article at medium preset. Balanced preset for QSV. Any plans to do a quality comparison?

 

[hkhan1989]

No, but if you care about quality, you won't believe this "half the size for the same quality" bullshit. If you can't see how poor HEVC files look compared to H.264 files that are twice as big, you should probably just go back to VHS.

Hahaha soo true!
If you can't tell the difference in quality, good for you, but don't get upset if I can tell the difference, because I can and I don't like it.

 

[Vonsid]

I'm gonna need some help here, so yesterday I converted my first file using Nvidia h265 encoding? Lost about 500 MO on a 2.5 go file, which was ok with me. This morning I tried to convert another one, using the same settings, but now the converted H265 file I get is bigger than the original H264 ! I don't get why. If someone have any idea, please feel free to share...

 

[Oracladeus]

Great article!
If you are already pirating movies and serials, do you really care about HEVC royalties and patents?

So I've been buying seasons of TV shows and ripping them to my server. Why do you immediately jump to pirating? How much do you get paid to say this and insult people simply trying to learn better ways of doing things? Yes, I very much care about royalties and patents because that stuff cost me money instead of being free or open source and available to use. I also have a boatload of home video that I've been looking for better, more compact ways to store. It's just rude to accuse people of pirating for simply looking for better ways to store video.

 

[Oracladeus]

Very nice and impressive article. AFAIC, I will never tradeoff quality versus anything else (4K Sony projector, large screen). When I finished to build a fanless high power HTPC (including NVidia GTX950), I did some tests using Staxrip using video card hardware encoding. At that time (8 months ago) I was not satisfied with the quality of the output and found Staxrip painless to use. As some others said in rather colorful langage, I would say that as usual marketing material surpasses the facts.

I'm curious about Staxrip. One of the biggest problems I'm having with ripping DVD's is interlacing. How well does it correct that? It's a really big problem on a lot of older TV shows.