Unimpressive results?

[Neillithan]

Hi, I've been getting my fair share of HEVC encodes, and I keep questioning the quality.

I have on my harddrive, an ~8GB movie encoded with x264, 1080p, 8bit, etc. I have the exact same movie as x265, but nearly 13GB in size, 1080p, 10bit.

After comparing many still images, I can say without a doubt, that the x264 encode looks better. It's less blurry, the subtleties are there, film grain seems to be better preserved. Everything about x264 is better and it's nearly 5 gigs smaller in filesize.

And as I was writing this, I decided to dig deeper. Turns out, the x264 movie contains AC3-640 soundtracks, while the second one contains more AC3 soundtracks, and an atmos. That explains things.

The audio tracks contained in the x265 encoding take up so much extra space, that the video itself is nearly 4000-6000 bitrate less than the x264 encoding at most times. Wow. No wonder it looks worse.

So, the real question is, would X265 look better at exactly the same bitrate as X264, especially in the 9000-10,000 bitrate range? I don't care about all of these small HEVC encodes, I just want something that looks better without taking 40 gigs of HD space. :P

Anyone else feel the same way? Wow this post transformed into something *special*.

[LoRd_MuldeR]

Hi, I've been getting my fair share of HEVC encodes, and I keep questioning the quality.

I have on my harddrive, an ~8GB movie encoded with x264, 1080p, 8bit, etc. I have the exact same movie as x265, but nearly 13GB in size, 1080p, 10bit.

Please explain: How exactly did you create or obtain those files? :confused:


The audio tracks contained in the x265 encoding take up so much extra space, that the video itself is nearly 4000-6000 bitrate less than the x264 encoding at most times. Wow. No wonder it looks worse.

How is the audio data related to x264 vs x265? Both can be combined with any audio format.

Also: When comparing the quality of video files, the audio data must be ignored. And the video bitrate (completely disregarding the audio bitrate) must be the same for both files.

Otherwise, if the video bitrates do not match, you are comparing apples and oranges. The comparison will be inherently biased...

[Neillithan]

Please explain: How exactly did you create or obtain those files? :confused:

A fairy wish prince granted me any wish I desire, and I wished for these 2 things to appear on my harddrive. I asked for an Xbox but nigga, you crazy, he couldn't afford that.
Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7l4ooX0ZZlk


How is the audio data related to x264 vs x265? Both can be combined with any audio format.

I know. I was initially unaware that the audio took up so much space, so when I first saw "13GB" I just assumed "well it's bigger, therfore it's higher quality". Nope. It's lower quality because the 13GB one contains more audio tracks and one massive audio track. So, the it just so happens that the video portion wasn't encoded at the same bitrate as the x264 one.


Also: When comparing the quality of video files, the audio data must be ignored. And the video bitrate (completely disregarding the audio bitrate) must be the same for both files.

Otherwise, if the video bitrates do not match, you are comparing apples and oranges. The comparison will be inherently biased...

Figured that out. :) :thanks:

[sneaker_ger]

This discussion isn't really new. It comes up quite often. The higher the bitrate the less HEVC can play out its advantages over AVC. For a typical HD Hollywood movie at 10 Mbps it will be difficult to see any advantage. To most people either will be transparent. Especially if the content is grainy people have trouble finding x265 settings that surpass x264. If you want to have a better result with x265 in such a situation you need to invest your time to learn, test and compare different settings. And CPU time for the longer encodes. If you aren't willing to do that I recommend you stick to x264 for the time being.

[Winston_Smith_101]

I have... a ~8GB movie encoded with x264, 1080p, 8bit, etc. I have the exact same movie as x265, but nearly 13GB in size, 1080p, 10bit.

The question are the settings and the versions of the used x264 and x265 encoders. Both make a HUGE difference. :-) The source and used filters can make a huge difference too.

After comparing many still images, I can say without a doubt, that the x264 encode looks better. It's less blurry, the subtleties are there, film grain seems to be better preserved.

Absolutely possible. This is a question of the versions and settings of both encoders again.

So, the real question is, would X265 look better at exactly the same bitrate as X264, especially in the 9000-10,000 bitrate range?

Definitely. Use the right settings, lots of CPU power and do the encoding on your own. And: :readfaq: x265 is a lot more effective than x264. But I would't encode with a specific bitrate, but with a specific target quality.

Take a look at the command line options: http://x265.readthedocs.io/en/default/cli.html and the preset options: http://x265.readthedocs.io/en/default/presets.html

[Asmodian]

At above mostly transparent bitrates I still prefer x264, x265 has gotten noticeably better recently but given 10+ Mbps for 1080p x264 is effectively identical, or even superior. With very clean content x265 does better compared to x264 but x264 can keep a sharpness that at least gives the illusion of more detail. At this point x265 has improved to the point that any differences between the two is pretty minor, with the right options, unless quality is noticeably bit rate limited where x265 usually wins easily.

This is even while using --no-sao and --no-strong-intra-smoothing, which seem to be beneficial for high bitrate encodes. At high bit rates the extra encode time for very slightly worse quality seems counter productive. 10-bit HEVC does have improved compatibility though. That could be a good reason.

edit: I am assuming 10-bit H.264.

[jd17]

10-bit HEVC does have improved compatibility though. That could be a good reason.

edit: I am assuming 10-bit H.264.

This is an important point.
While there is a lot of hardware-decoding for x265 10bit these days, there is practically no hardware-decoding of x264 10bit whatsoever.

This is why I compared x264 8bit to x265 10bit results and eventually moved to x265 (using tune grain).
I get the significant benefit of the 10bit upsampling and I can still hardware-decode on cheap players.


However, I don't get the impression that the TO is going to create his own encodes anytime soon. ;)

[Neillithan]

This is an important point.
However, I don't get the impression that the TO is going to create his own encodes anytime soon. ;)

To be completely fair, I spent a lot of time learning how to convert x264 with the highest quality for some of my old Sony Vegas projects. I would output to huffyuv, then convert to x264 using MeGUI. Nowadays, I use Xmedia Recode for that.

However, doing my own x265 encodes using xmedia Recode has been extremely slow compared to NVENC HEVC for pretty obvious reasons I'd say.

I compared some stills from NVENC HEVC to x265 a few months ago and I really couldn't tell a difference, but this probably really depends on source material, whether it's moving or not, etc etc.

Anyway, long story short, I don't really have any reason to convert anything to x265, not unless the top 3 web browsers suddenly all announce support for HEVC all at once.

For all other things, I'm the kind of guy that would just buy multiple 6 or 8TB harddrives and just store everything as 8-16GB MKVs. Quality at a "reasonably" high bitrate is most important to me, not being able to preserve quality at low bitrate. I don't really see the point in encoding things at such a low bitrate unless your target is a mobile phone, or a web browser, or people in locations with absolute trash internet. It seems to me like x265 would be most valuable to services like Netflix, and not for people just trying to convert their family video collection (generally speaking).

Oh, I just thought of a good reason to encode x265. I own a program called Displayfusion which lets you choose video wallpapers for backgrounds. It actually supports MKV with HEVC. So, for the purpose of making a video wallpaper with really good quality, using x265 here would be preferred over NVENC HEVC or x264.

So to summarize, yeah I don't have a million and one reasons to convert anything to x265, I just have only a few.

[MeteorRain]

x265 becomes more important when UHD content comes into the market. Encoding a UHD movie in high quality easily eats up 30-50GB.

For 1080p contents, I don't see much reason to convert from encoded x264 files to x265. But to backup content from the bluray disk I'd go with x265 10-bit cuz, why not.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Looks like someone is comparing some files they acquired from the high seas. Tsk tsk. Please keep rule 6 in mind, @Neillithan

Regardless, the big advantages of HEVC to content providers / distributors are as follows:

1) Dramatically better performance at lower bitrates, which lets you remove lower resolution layers from your ABR stack and offer better quality at similar bitrates (or maintain quality and reduce bitrates)

2) Dramatically better performance for UHD. Like... H.264 is totally infeasible for streaming 4k, you need at least 30 Mbps. You can do nicely with 15-20 using HEVC.

3) Native 10 bit on all recent big screens, thus enabling _really_ cool stuff like High Dynamic Range (HDR) and Wide Color Gamut (WCG), for example using HDR10, Dolby Vision, or Hybrid-log Gamma (HLG)

For the high end viewer without significant bandwidth constraints (like yours truly) , it's _all_ about #3. The visual impact of HDR/WCG on a good OLED is incomparable. For most viewers, 4k / UHD is meh, especially at typical viewing distances. Did you know that basically zero Hollywood movies render their VFX at 4k? They all do 2k and upscale. However, HDR/WCG really has the wow factor when it's done well.

It's not quite as big of a deal as moving from SD to HD, but it's fabulous. I'm totally hooked!

Circling back to the topic, HEVC doesn't bring much to the table at the "100% transparent 1080p BluRay backup" level IMO. I've found that using x265 enables me to get 1080p quality that I'm happy with at 30-40% lower bitrates than a reference x264 encode. That's NOT to say that it's transparent, but it's a reasonable tradeoff that IS dramatically better than an x264 encode with 30-40% lower bitrate.