h.264 to h.265 Transcode via NVENC

[EricGRIT09 6]

Wasn't able to find this in my searches, but sorry if its been answered already.  Is there any way we can setup Emby to transcode h.264 media to h.265 using hardware encoding (specifically NVENC)?  

[Luke 42085]

Currently no. Why would you want to do that since pretty much every device can already handle h264?

[EricGRIT09 6]

Currently no. Why would you want to do that since pretty much every device can already handle h264?

 

Simply for bandwidth/bitrate reasons.  In my scenario, which I understand is totally an edge case, I have h.264 remux files for the most part.  I think these are something like 15-25mbps on average.  If I transcode down to 2mbps h.264, for example, it looks absolutely terrible.  However, I have converted my entire library to 720p h.265 using NVENC at 1300kbps and it looks very similar to a 4mbps transcode using h.264 while using a fraction of the bandwidth.  Understand none of this looks great, but it is more than good enough for my remote users.

 

My upload speed is only 10-12mbps, so the difference between 1.3mbps and 4mbps is huge for me.  All my end-users, which is just my immediate family, have clients which can support h.265 so they can direct play my 1.3mbps files.  I just want to get out of the manual conversions of files and transcode on the fly, which I would think would be theoretically possible as I can convert a movie to h.265 1.3mbps in about 15 minutes using NVENC.

[Luke 42085]

Ok. Encoding to h265 is extremely slow so that's why we haven't even looked at it as of yet.

[EricGRIT09 6]

Ok. Encoding to h265 is extremely slow so that's why we haven't even looked at it as of yet.

 

Understood, and thanks.  Hopefully with maturing hardware acceleration and wider acceptance of h.265 we will see something like this happen.  My scenario is a perfect storm of terrible upload speeds while having modern 4k client devices, as well as having the hardware to do the encoding fast enough.  Still, as this all becomes more prevalent I would think this could greatly improve efficiency for many users.

Edited October 10, 2017 by EricGRIT09

[RanmaCanada 500]

The easiest thing to do would be to convert what you currently have to HEVC, that way you don't have to worry about converting on the fly.  Just use handbrake or ffmpeg and do the conversion properly, as nvenc, even with Rigaya's help is still crap.  Head over to doom9 and get some of the best settings from there so that your transcodes will look seemless.  You will also get the benefit of saving tonnes of space.  I'll warn you, proper encodes will take time.  But if you want to do quick and dirty just grab staxrip, grab the latest build of nvenc64 from http://rigaya34589.blog135.fc2.com/blog-category-17.html and you can just copy it into the apps/nvenc directory with no issues.  Set it up and test some settings to get it as you like, make sure you use 10bit for elimination of banding, etc, and go to town.  The encodes won't be perfect, but they'll be fast at least.  Try for about crf 21-22.  Any lower and you won't really gain and file size difference.  Any higher, and well, you'll see what will happen.  But experiment and find settings you like.