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Old 31st May 2016, 15:12   #1002  |  Link
r0lZ
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Join Date: Jul 2003
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Well, 10-bit and x265 encoding have above all the reputation to be incompatible with most hardware. Only a few peoples can afford an extremely expensive 10-bit monitor, and I'm even not sure that 10-bit HD TVs exist. 10-bit will probably slowly become a new standard (probably with 4K UHD), but even that is not sure. Most peoples are still happy with the standard PAL or NTSC resolution of the DVD, and I'm not sure the market is ready for high quality 10-bit HD!

My main concern is that Avisynth is not supposed to output 10-bit. It should theoretically output only 8-bit (furthermore, limited by the TV range, so it's effectively less than 8-bit.) If you do the resize with x264, I agree that some new colors can appear, but afaik it is not possible to resize with x265. The removal of the noise during the compression is mainly responsible of the banding, but I don't know if encoding in 10-bit gives better result, because the noise is removed anyway. Is the encoder smart enough to replace the noisy pixels with an uniform color chosen among the 10-bit colors? Or does it simply remove the pixels not equal to its neighbours, therefore replacing the pixel with a color available in the 8-bit range? Honestly, I don't know.

And what happens if you play the movie on a 8-bit monitor or TV? Again, I suppose that the quality of the reduction from 10 to 8-bit depends of the TV. A high quality, 10-bit aware monitor will probably generate some dithering in order to globally keep the original colors, but mid-range TVs and monitor will probably simply truncate the 2 additional bits of colors, and display terrible banding artefacts, reducing the gain to nothing. Most TVs may even fail to recognise the 10-bit colors correctly, and either refuse to play the file or play it with totally wrong colors.

Also, supporting the other color depths is not as trivial as it looks. For example, I have to take into account that 10-bit h264 is not compliant with the BD standard, and therefore I have to disable the BD Compatible option when something else than 8-bit x264 is selected. In the other hand, if you replace the exe, you are supposed to know what you are doing!

Anyway, I will try to do some tests. If it appears that many TVs and monitors benefit of the 10-bit encoding, I will implement it. But currently, I'm sceptical.
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Last edited by r0lZ; 31st May 2016 at 15:33.
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