Possible to reach visually transparent encodes of anime with 35-40% compression?

[Boulder]

Originally Posted by N'Cha

well my target is my PC (it can read anything) but i also plan to buy a nvidia shield in a few months and to maybe use plex (not sure, as it would be hard to leave MPC-HC + Madvr)

If you are looking to use the thing only for Kodi, I can recommend a Homatics Box R 4K Plus. With a recent firmware and CoreELEC 20.3, all the UHD thingies (HDR10(+), DoVi) should work out of the box just fine.

[benwaggoner]

Originally Posted by N'Cha

Wouldn't it be better to set level 5.1 main tier due to higher bitrate supported? because with 4.1 if not going for high tier, there's not enough bitrate, but if going for 4.1 high tier, which has enough bitrate, is there risks for it to be less compatible than 5.1 main tier nowadays? Well as far as it can be read by MPC-HC, nvidia shield and maybe plex, on potentially a tablet (for the "in plane" times) i'm good with any as far as it can support 40Mb/s (so 4.0, 4.1 or 5.0 high tier or 5.1 main tier) but maybe some encoding parameters are only available/applicable with certain encoders levels and/or tier?

For anime content, bitrate doesn't need to go that high anyway, so I doubt there would be visible benefit going beyond 4.1.

The HEVC profile/level max bitrates are pretty reasonable overall. Level 5.0's 25 Mbps isn't quite high enough for 4K with a lot of fine film grain, but the others are fine by me.

[N'Cha]

On a test CR 14 gives me a bitrate of 18,5 Mb/s compared to the like 38MB/s of the original file (and the file goes from 6,79Gb to 3,26Gb despite the mix of CRF14, presets slower and the command line you told me were important for anime (tskip, tu-inter 4 etc.) with 56minutes of encoding per 24min episode, so very satisfied with the compression of 45% despite very reserving settings!). With CRF 14.5 I get like 17,2Mb/s and with CRF 15 I get 16 Mb/s . I was concerned that both crf 15 and 14.5 was not enough for anime, compared to that very high bitrate of the original episode (even if it's more efficient). Isn't high bitrate important for at least stuff like banding? I thought that the lower the bitrate is, the more chance there is to have bitrate (on the original files I mean)

[N'Cha]

Originally Posted by Boulder

If you are looking to use the thing only for Kodi, I can recommend a Homatics Box R 4K Plus. With a recent firmware and CoreELEC 20.3, all the UHD thingies (HDR10(+), DoVi) should work out of the box just fine.

I'll check this product thanks

[benwaggoner]

Originally Posted by N'Cha

On a test CR 14 gives me a bitrate of 18,5 Mb/s compared to the like 38MB/s of the original file (and the file goes from 6,79Gb to 3,26Gb despite the mix of CRF14, presets slower and the command line you told me were important for anime (tskip, tu-inter 4 etc.) with 56minutes of encoding per 24min episode, so very satisfied with the compression of 45% despite very reserving settings!). With CRF 14.5 I get like 17,2Mb/s and with CRF 15 I get 16 Mb/s . I was concerned that both crf 15 and 14.5 was not enough for anime, compared to that very high bitrate of the original episode (even if it's more efficient). Isn't high bitrate important for at least stuff like banding? I thought that the lower the bitrate is, the more chance there is to have bitrate (on the original files I mean)

CRF of 14 is probably overkill, yeah, with the other anime-oriented features in use. CRF 16 is where I'd start, and you can pick the highest value that remains visually transparent for you. And encoding in 10-bit can help reduce banding without any bitrate increase.

The source frame rate isn't really material here. H.264 can encode anime quite efficiently as well, so the source may be pretty close to lossless. If you do a --csv-log-level 2, you'll get per-frame quality metrics. There's likely a frame QP value beyond which you start to get visible degradation, so making sure you aren't getting QPs above that threshold much on "interesting" (non-black, non-static) frames is a better way to find your optimum CRF value. And CRF roughly maps to QP.

To save some more bits, increasing the --pbratio and perhaps --ipratio can help. Lots of anime b-frames are pretty much just duplicate frames except for perhaps noise. --frame-dup should be great for anime if you're using a post 3.5 build, but I've not been able to get it to do much in my testing.