If I don't care about encoding time, can I improve this setting?

[Esurnir]

Interesting, since umh + subme 6 is exactly what the MeGui CRF HighQuality profile says :confused:

Each person their own thinking on what the best encoding settings is about. But Dark Shikari developing x264, I can think it's safe to say that he put a lot of love into developing subpixel refinement ;) .

[AntiJw]

These are the settings I use that take a day to encode a 1080p movie. My target is a NMT/Popcorn Hour A-100, which supports up to HP@L4.1. Even though the thread title is about ignoring time, I would like to speed things up a bit. I'm using svn 1063. Any recommendations on where to start to speed things up without sacrificing too much quality?

crf=22:level=41:ref=3:mixed-refs=1:bframes=5:weightb=1:b-adapt=2:direct=auto:b-pyramid=1:me=umh:subme=9:
analyse=all:8x8dct=1:trellis=1:no-fast-pskip=1:psy-rd=1,1:vbv-bufsize=30000:vbv-maxrate=40000
analyse/partitions=all is not worth to use on high-definition video (1080p/720p) if you try to save encoding-time. Default analyse/partitions is enough.

[burfadel]

I know this has been dealt with in the past, but with so many changes to x264 the answer may be different!

Is there any benefit from using --merange 32 when using UMH, considering the encoded material may vary from animation to tv shows/movies? What is the slowdown/improvement like? I use CRF so I guess the improvement would show as a smaller file size?

I have done some tests, but I'd like peoples opinions on it since it seems the slowdown is not what it used to be!