Jdiesel 1114 Posted November 10, 2016 Share Posted November 10, 2016 Just curious on everyone's plan moving forward with h.256. I know that the benefit of h.265 is mainly on low bitrate videos but now that hardware decoding is becoming more common I'm curious to see if others are making the switch. I personally operate a rented dedicated server so storage is expensive/limited and the clients connecting to it don't always have the greatest bandwidth. I have just recently switched to h.256 for TV series and have noticed a fairly significant drop in storage usage (almost half the file size) with only a minor drop in picture quality. I am a lot less picky about picture quality when it comes to TV series so I don't mind. I haven't switched to h.256 for movies yet as I don't see much of an overall benefit yet. The only current drawback has been transcoding h.256 to the few devices that don't support hardware decoding as it is more taxing on the server CPU but now that the Chromecast Ultra is rumored to support h.256 this should eliminate the need to transcode for all my users should they decide to upgrade. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dark_slayer 103 Posted November 10, 2016 Share Posted November 10, 2016 I've saved a fair amount of space moving my large show collections (that I intend to keep) over to 265 when available Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Allan Cameron 40 Posted November 12, 2016 Share Posted November 12, 2016 While h265 is excellent and offers better compression with excellent quality I still stick with the standard h264. Why? Because there is still more widespread h264 support and as we move ahead it will still be supported. H265 is much more CPU intensive and is not supported on as many devices. The way I see it right now there's just not much point in me bothering with h265 until it becomes the standard and when it does my h264 files will still be fully supported. Unless it's a 4K movie, I just don't bother at this point. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xnappo 1593 Posted November 12, 2016 Share Posted November 12, 2016 Yeah, sticking with h264 for now. It isn't like the change from h263 to h264 when storage and bandwidth was at a premium. Of course eventually everything will switch, but I don't have any reason to right now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
e123enitan 237 Posted November 13, 2016 Share Posted November 13, 2016 I have been converting from 264 to 265, I have saved a lot of space, with proper setting of Handbrake, there shouldn't a noticeable diff between the original 264 to 265. I have Tronsmart S905 with 450Mali, OS LibreElec https://forum.libreelec.tv/thread-2156.html plays 265 flawless. I planned to convert everything both Movies and TV Shown, it will take time, but it surely worth the efforts in my view. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Allan Cameron 40 Posted November 13, 2016 Share Posted November 13, 2016 (edited) I have been converting from 264 to 265, I have saved a lot of space, with proper setting of Handbrake, there shouldn't a noticeable diff between the original 264 to 265. I have Tronsmart S905 with 450Mali, OS LibreElec https://forum.libreelec.tv/thread-2156.html plays 265 flawless. I planned to convert everything both Movies and TV Shown, it will take time, but it surely worth the efforts in my view. That would be an incredibly massive undertaking in some peoples cases with huge collections such as myself. Taking the time to convert everything over with large libraries is far worse than just buying more storage which is pretty cheap nowadays. Thinking about what I have and converting everything over in my case would just be insane. That plus adding the fact that it takes quite a bit of converting to save any amount space worthwhile plus quality loss even if not noticeable. I'm glad to hear it's working well for you but that won't be a worthwhile option for a lot of people. Edited November 13, 2016 by a1b2c3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
samandre 0 Posted November 13, 2016 Share Posted November 13, 2016 I have yet to see an encoded h265 with the same quality of the h264 even at crf16.With my 55' TV at 2mt distance i can see lots and lots of differences especially in low lights scenes Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
e123enitan 237 Posted November 21, 2016 Share Posted November 21, 2016 That would be an incredibly massive undertaking in some peoples cases with huge collections such as myself. Taking the time to convert everything over with large libraries is far worse than just buying more storage which is pretty cheap nowadays. Thinking about what I have and converting everything over in my case would just be insane. That plus adding the fact that it takes quite a bit of converting to save any amount space worthwhile plus quality loss even if not noticeable. I'm glad to hear it's working well for you but that won't be a worthwhile option for a lot of people. No doubt it's an incredible undertaken, but i have done quite a lot, in the last two months, save about 7TB of NAS space, I was able to speed up the process coz of 3 PC of i7 processors, quite a lot to cover, but if the desire is to save hard space one have to start somewhere, also I hope the efforts will pay off in cost saving on my cloud storage, I must say I am not limited in terms of NAS storage, but my collections are growing fast as demand grows due to families request. Also, I must say that I noticed a fast load time when I play x265 moves/Tv's on low power client system, may be it because the files are now smaller compared to original both on hardwired and wifi connections. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jdiesel 1114 Posted December 22, 2016 Author Share Posted December 22, 2016 (edited) Just a bit of an update on my journey into x265... In the past I have been ripping most of my movies to 1080p x264 mkv's with a video bitrate of approximately 9000-10000kbps and a DTS or DTS-MA audio track with a bitrate of 1.5mbps. This was fine for myself as I had the internet connection to stream from my remote server at these bitrates and the hardware to direct play them. Fast forward to today, I now have a few family members connecting to my server, I am connecting a lot when I travel, and am generally finding more reasons to connect away from home. So I find that I am transcoding my movies more and more. To make matters worse my family members live outside of any city and have poor internet connections so they are limited to about 5mbps overall bandwidth. So I decided to start encoding movies using x265 as all the playback hardware supports it now including my android phone and tablet. I settled on 720p x265 mkv's with a bitrate of approximately 3500kbps and a AC3 5.1 audio track with a bitrate of 640kbps. My original plan was to keep encoding higher bitrate movies for myself when I was at home but after watching a few of the 720p x265 encodes I felt like I was getting 95% of the quality at less than half the file size. Granted Kodi does a pretty good job upscaling 720p to 1080p with the lanczos3 scaler. I don't have a 4K TV or more than 5.1 speaker setup so that makes things simpler. Playback now starts instantly and RW/FF is almost instant. Do I enjoy the movie experience any less using a smaller file? Absolutely not! Edited December 22, 2016 by Jdiesel Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Luke 37139 Posted December 22, 2016 Share Posted December 22, 2016 The device support isn't there yet. I would at least wait until the browsers have native support. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jdiesel 1114 Posted December 22, 2016 Author Share Posted December 22, 2016 (edited) I can direct play on the Android mobile app and the Nvidia Shield running the Android TV app. All my other devices are using amlogic s905 CPUs running LibreELEC. I don't use the web app very often so that doesn't affect me personally but others may be different. I guess the big difference is that it is easier to transcode a x254 file than it is a x265 file. But to be fair these low bitrate x265 encodes play fine on my RPi2 without hardware support for x265 so I would imagine that any CPU made in the last 10 years should software decode them fine. Its when you get into 4K 10 bit encodes that hardware starts to struggle. Edited December 22, 2016 by Jdiesel Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Deathsquirrel 741 Posted December 22, 2016 Share Posted December 22, 2016 The device support isn't there yet. I would at least wait until the browsers have native support. This for me too. I'd suddenly be transcoding everything on my server since none of my client devices natively decode this. Give me native playback and hardware-accelerated encoding in Handbrake and I'll re-rip the blu-ray collection. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sneakers282 5 Posted January 2, 2017 Share Posted January 2, 2017 H.265 is not a codec with a wide spread future. It has been rejected by the tech industry for good reasons (IP became toxic) and the Alliance for Open Media will be releasing their new AV1 codec in late 2017 or 2018. AV1 will replace H.264, H.265 and VP9 for all internet streaming media so there is going to be a ton of new hardware rolling out to support that. H.265 will only be used in 4K Blu-ray, some TV services perhaps and personal video encoders, essentially it's going to be the DivX of out time which is ironic as it was some of the same companies that torpedoed MPEG4/DivX from becoming a standard internet media codec did the exact same thing to H.265. Any support for H.265 in a web browser is highly dubious as that would undermine AV1 and pretty much everyone in the industry is behind AV1 (bar Apple but even they backed off H.265 and are sitting on the fence). So just keep that in mind that H.265 support is no longer guaranteed on future media devices. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mediacowboy 438 Posted January 2, 2017 Share Posted January 2, 2017 I plan to stay with h.264 for the immediate future. Trying to convert 3000+ movies and 800+ TV shows doesn't sound like fun. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dark_slayer 103 Posted January 3, 2017 Share Posted January 3, 2017 H.265 is not a codec with a wide spread future. It has been rejected by the tech industry for good reasons (IP became toxic) and the Alliance for Open Media will be releasing their new AV1 codec in late 2017 or 2018. AV1 will replace H.264, H.265 and VP9 for all internet streaming media so there is going to be a ton of new hardware rolling out to support that. H.265 will only be used in 4K Blu-ray, some TV services perhaps and personal video encoders, essentially it's going to be the DivX of out time which is ironic as it was some of the same companies that torpedoed MPEG4/DivX from becoming a standard internet media codec did the exact same thing to H.265. Any support for H.265 in a web browser is highly dubious as that would undermine AV1 and pretty much everyone in the industry is behind AV1 (bar Apple but even they backed off H.265 and are sitting on the fence). So just keep that in mind that H.265 support is no longer guaranteed on future media devices. Awfully early to be concluding codec futures with such conviction 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Happy2Play 8319 Posted January 3, 2017 Share Posted January 3, 2017 Hmm, this article pretty much covers what sneakers282 said. http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/A-Progress-Report-The-Alliance-for-Open-Media-and-the-AV1-Codec-110383.aspx Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Waldonnis 148 Posted January 4, 2017 Share Posted January 4, 2017 There is a big push towards AV1 for a bunch of reasons, notably the hardware and software companies that are behind it and the needs of the broadcasting sector. Licensing cost is also a very big driver - one which has relegated many codecs to relative obscurity in the past (AV1 is royalty-free, I believe, unlike HEVC). Look up the licensing costs on HEVC and you'll understand why I bring it up If the efficiency gains being touted by AV1 are close to reality, then it'll be a big win in the long run for everyone involved. It does offer some uncertainty for people who want to "future-proof" upgrade something like a video card or processor now, though, since mid-to-late 2017 is the "release" target, with hardware support likely happening up to 12 months later. The question mark in my mind is the SoC market. Granted, they tend to follow the industry rather than lead it, but not seeing names like Broadcom or Qualcomm on the partner list may mean the mobile/tablet/STB market will be slower to adopt it and release supporting products. At least ARM is in there, and the broadcasters pushing it may mean earlier adoption by the SoC producers due to their use in STBs and televisions. I doubt HEVC will just go away, though, since it is the adopted standard for certain applications. The streaming providers, though, will likely hop on board with AV1 as soon as is feasible since it helps them the most (notably Amazon/Netflix/Hulu/YouTube). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dark_slayer 103 Posted January 4, 2017 Share Posted January 4, 2017 Hmm, this article pretty much covers what sneakers282 said. http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/A-Progress-Report-The-Alliance-for-Open-Media-and-the-AV1-Codec-110383.aspx Ah yes, multiple sources all pointing towards OMA. Nobody thought h264 would rise to the prominence it did after YouTube declared it was going with vp9, but look where we are Licensing cost is also a very big driver - one which has relegated many codecs to relative obscurity (AV1 is royalty-free, I believe, unlike HEVC). Look up the licensing costs on HEVC and you'll understand why I bring it up Well Nvidia's current SoC (x1) and most all cheap Android boxes by amlogic and rockchip are already supporting it. I still think it's too early to say, and I don't think 265 is going anywhere. I could be wrong, time will tell Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebr 14943 Posted January 4, 2017 Share Posted January 4, 2017 It may not be going anywhere but there sure seems to be enough evidence of uncertainty to make anyone pause in an effort to convert their library whole-scale over to this format... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Waldonnis 148 Posted January 4, 2017 Share Posted January 4, 2017 (edited) Ah yes, multiple sources all pointing towards OMA. Nobody thought h264 would rise to the prominence it did after YouTube declared it was going with vp9, but look where we are Well Nvidia's current SoC (x1) and most all cheap Android boxes by amlogic and rockchip are already supporting it. I still think it's too early to say, and I don't think 265 is going anywhere. I could be wrong, time will tell There were other reasons for the rise of h.264 as well that I won't get into (and I think you mean VP8 when mentioning h.264, since it was more of the level competitor for h.264). I personally like VP8/9 technically and even have a file or two that I used VP9 for encoding, but they aren't without their own issues. Google's formats also didn't see much support from hardware decoding until very recently, which greatly hindered adoption of VP9 especially (since it's computationally heavier than VP8). On an individual level, licensing for HEVC doesn't sound bad, and reductions in the costs in the past couple of years has helped this. It adds up, though, when you're dealing with volume production and/or distribution. Like many of us, companies like "free" when they can get it, and even spending a few million on royalty payments is done begrudgingly. Money is never the sole factor, but there were many companies that grumbled about the cost when some of the content providers decided to go "all-in" with HEVC initially (some still grumble about it). It's one reason why there seems to be more unified support for AV1 compared to VP9 (although certainly not the only reason, nor the most important). Honestly, though, it's largely an academic debate outside of the industries involved at this stage. With no firm timeline on when you can buy a TV/Roku/ATV/video card/etc that supports hardware decoding AV1, it's not really worth considering quite yet IMO. Even then, we still need to see software encoders introduced (or even a final spec on the format itself) before any of us can see if it's worth the time/effort to re-encode things. My personal take for those on the fence with HEVC: I wouldn't entertain a wholesale h.264->HEVC conversion of even my relatively meager library simply because HDDs are cheaper than the time/energy cost it would take to do it, especially since most of my stuff is 720p DVD or 1080p BR sources (no real gain outside of storage space). HEVC is very time consuming to encode compared to h.264, and while QSV/NVENC are faster for that, they just don't cut it for me quite yet quality-wise. For 4k or HDR content, HEVC is the best answer currently, however. h.264 can support 10bit colour and 4k, but device support for playback of those files can be iffy at best, and HEVC is just more efficient at both anyway. Basically, convert when/where it makes sense to do so or if you have a need for what any new codec provides. I'm definitely not casting any stones at anyone who wants to change codecs for non-technical reasons - I think about an HEVC conversion just about every week (I would never actually do it), but mostly because I just like encoding stuff AV1 will get here when it gets here, and the "should I?" cycle will begin yet again (not my first rodeo, as they say). Edit: I would expect to hear more "it's really coming" type news around NAB's convention time, so expect a bigger public push around 2nd quarter. Edited January 4, 2017 by Waldonnis Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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