8bit or 10bit x264

[Carpo]

I have been doing some reading about 8bit and 10bit x264 but I am still a little unsure of which I should use.

Mainly I watch most things on my PC, but sometimes I do use my PS3 to watch things on my TV, which I stream from my media PC.

I have noticed when using MPC-HC and Lavfilters , which I select either CUVID or Intel Quicksync (laptop) I notice that when playing 8bit files it uses CUVID and Intel, yet when I play 10bit it uses avcodec, which I am guessing is falling back to software.

Should I stick to the 8bit x264 or should I go to 10bit? Other than better compression and less banding when using 10bit are there any other benefits to using it?

[LoRd_MuldeR]

Hardware support for 10-Bit H.264 is pretty much non-existing. That's also the reason why MPC-HC will fall back to software decoders with 10-Bit H.264.

And I highly doubt the PS3 supports 10-Bit H.264 at all - unless the stream gets transcoded "on the fly" to some supported format, by the streaming software.

(AFAIK, the PS3 supports "High" profile at Level 4.1, but not the "High 10" profile)

[Carpo]

so best to stick with 8bit then really :)

[benwaggoner]

so best to stick with 8bit then really :)
Although it would be interesting to hear what the PS3 would do when asked to play a 10-bit file.

[Carpo]

Just says unsupported format, nothing that exciting :rolleyes:

[jpsdr]

Other than better compression and less banding when using 10bit are there any other benefits to using it?
No, and these benefits seem realy significant only on animes without grain.

[Flux]

How 10-bit x264 will affect timelapse videos with orange sunset glow gradients? Shouldn't it preserve those smooth gradients better than 8-bit?

The problem is that 10-bit is more demanding for CPU. What I can do to keep the quality of the video, but reduce decoding requirements? I have some 10-bit 4:4:4 encoded videos, but the bitrate is like 150 Mbit/s. CPU is running over 90% all the time going 99% which will cause laggy video for second or two when starting the video and it gets laggy everytime when the video starts from the beginning, if I use repeat playback in MPC-HC. I really like the quality of that video, but current settings seems to be too demanding for my computer.

I also tested the video with RAM disk, so hard drive is not the reason for that beginning lagginess.

I'm currently using this command-line (10-bit x264)

avs4x264mod.exe --crf 10.0 --tune grain --fps 24 --output-csp i444 --output "video.264" "video.avs"

[Biggiesized]

It depends on your souce (>8 bit?) and if there are any banding artifacts in it already.