For those of you that torrent video files this question is geared toward you. I’m looking for a sweet spot between quality, size & speed for HEVC encoding. I’m using FastFlix and seem to be getting really wide and varying speeds.
I’m not really literate on all this video lingo but I can, at least, get it going. Most files take anywhere from 5-17 mins for a 30-40 mins clip. I have a AMD Radeon RX 470 graphics card but when I try and use the VCEEnc it won’t let me use CRF which I’ve heard it the best way.
Anyway, if you’re willing to share knowledge or what settings you use when you convert video to HEVC that might help me speed up my processing, I would be eternally grateful.
In most cases, most release groups already fine tune encoding settings towards various balances of file size and quality, so the best option is to decide on a set of release group whose standards meet your needs and just use the files as they come without further modification.
Applying lossy compression to a video that’s already had lossy compression applied to it degrades it unnecessarily, so if you’re going to compress it yourself, it’s best to start with the remux, aka the original media file.
I’d personally recommend releases from members of the qxr group and Vyndros.
I understand about reencoding and I’ve gotten a lot of flak about that from a lot of people but as I mentioned above it’s more of a space issue with me also. I appreciate the mention of groups to look to as that helps much. Thanks for your input!
IDK I’d assume anything uploaded more than 10 years ago needs to be re-encoded (but you should learn more about the old and new encodings before generalizing that blindly).
I’ve also had success removing embedded language audio tracks from a file that had 5+ languages from the original Blu-ray. Each language was over 1GB/per movie for a specific offending collection.
I think that’s part of my problems I have new stuff and stuff waaayyy over 10 years old and I’m trying to find a “sweet spot” for everything and I don’t think that’s possible. Yeah, I know what you mean about the additional language, audio, etc. tracks especially in stuff I get from Nyaa. I tend to batch demux a lot of that out before I even start messing around with re-encoding the file. Thanks for your input!
Don’t encode lossy to lossy. The encoding will take forever and the image quality will suffer. If you want file size savings redownload your media in h265 or whatever. Or temporarily download a lossless copy, encode, and delete.
Are you short on disk space? Personally I’d just buy enough storage that I don’t even need to care
Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. I only have two 2Tb drives and they are about full so I’m looking to downsize my files. Someone recommended buying a USB hub and several 16Tb Seagate drives to accomodate but I’m not sure if that’s the best option.
Different people have different needs.
If someone has a lot of time and not a lot of money re encoding video is a decent answer.
I’ve been there and done that before.
Replacing (or adding a 10TB USB to your ) single 2 tb drive isn’t a horrible idea. It’ll take you quite a while to go through that 10 tb. In the meantime you look toward getting an old case and some kind of modest motherboard and setting up an Unraid. It’s a journey, and unless you are made of cash you’re not going to get to your endpoint all in one jump.
Unraid is budget friendly because you can add whatever size disc you want to do it, It supports a parity drive so you have some support against failure. The only truly difficult part is that the parity drive must be as big as the largest drive in the box.
In the end only you can decide what works for you. If you want to re-encode your stuff, 2 pass is best. You are going to lose quality, that’s unavoidable, But if you’re watching it on a TV 12 ft away, You’re going to forget about any quality as soon as you get in grossed in anything you’re watching.
Thank you so much for your input. I’m so glad someone understands my point of view and doesn’t keep telling me DON’T REENCODE. I know that but we do what we have to when we’re not made of $$$. So, you’re saying in re-encoding to let it select it’s bitrate and use 2-pass and be done with it. That’s actually helpful because FastFlix will only allow CQP or Bitrate encoding when using the AMD hardware acceleration VCEEnc. Again, thanks for the advice!
It’s your media you do what you want with it.
Pick a busy movie with a bunch of stuff going on, and then pick a really dark movie.
Try different encodings with each one of those. You’re playing a game of time versus quality. And you keep in mind, the electricity for those encodes isn’t free either.
Try them with a fixed bit rate, try them with the two pass. If the fixed rate doesn’t look good try bumping the rate up. You’ll get a feel for it eventually.
Back when I was hard up for disc, I made everything 1080p HEVC single pass constant rate. I don’t even remember exactly what the bit rate was but I would just encode everything and then watch a sample out of it. If one of them turned out bad I would reincode it with better settings.
Dual pass will get you a little smaller and better output, But it takes forever, and you’re sitting there burning watts all night long.
In the end you just need to fiddle with it, and weigh the output versus your resources.
Thank you for your input and understanding my situation but I’ve been fiddling around so much I’ve haven’t gotten even one series or movie encoded. I’m about ready to just pirate a commercial product and see if that will do what I want it to but I probably still wouldn’t find a product that would do everything I want, I’m afraid. Thanks again for your time & input!
https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/H.265
Most of the “commercial apps” are just wrappers for ffmpeg.
I’d start with FFmpeg. Once you see what your output is like you can then decide to move over to something more fancy.
I’m confused… Are you grabbing pirated video files from the net and re-encoding them… If you’re attempting to further compress already compressed video, you’re just zipping a zip file. It’s crazy and you’ll do nothing but bloat the file size (versus a properly compressed video file) and further reduce the quality of the video via artifacts. I’ll call the police and have you committed right now.
If you’re grabbing 8/4k or UHD BD movies and re-encoding them into lets say, 1080p HEVC 10bit, I could see that being worth it if you really love the movie (and have 5 days with nothing to do), but only if you’re going from an inferior compression to better (h264 to h265), otherwise like I said, you’re zipping a zip file.
you’ll do nothing but bloat the file size
That’s very wrong. Going from h.264 to h.265 cuts file size down to 25-50% of the original. That’s what the HE is for in HEVC.
- I’ve been encoding HEVC for a long time and I’ve not once seen a file-size drop that dramatically. You’re outrageously overestimating the file-size savings here.
- If a video file is already compressed you’ll see diminished and even negative returns by attempting to compress it further. OP seems to be taking pre compressed video files from the internet and attempting to compress them again (lossy to lossy) which is very very very stupid.
You’re correct that it will reduce file size but encoding lossy to lossy is foolish. You will introduce compression artifacts and have an objectively worse quality image, the encode will take much longer than if you used a proper lossless source, and if you don’t set your configs right you’ll strip out subtitles, tags, chapters, etc
Additionally if the h264 was already compressed by a lot h265 won’t save all that much space, giving you all the downsides with basically no upside
Only dummies encode lossy>lossy. The debate about lossy>h265 is one thing (h265 is not for archival) but h264>h265 will result in visible distortion
I also went through the phase where I thought I was an audiophile/videophile and everything I collected needed to be in ultra high quality. Eventually I realized it was stupid and now I spend a third as much money on storage and still have perfectly fine media that I have no issues with in practice despite the flaws I’m supposed to see in theory.
I don’t understand what you are arguing?
If you’re arguing that downloading remuxes and only flac is foolish then yeah, 99.8% of the time h264 and 320 mp3 are going to be indistinguishable on most setups with most content. H265 will be the same on like 99.5% of setups with slightly less content and will save tons of space. Sure. But this assumes the lossy encodes were done properly from a lossless master
if you encode lossy to lossy it will result in visible and audible distortion of the image and audio. Sometimes it’s minimal, sometimes it’s quite bad, sometimes it’s masked by your equipment, but it’s always there. Further, you’d spend more money on electricity running your cpu on full blast encoding terabytes of video files when you could simply just redownload your library in whatever format by someone who knows what they’re doing (if you’re so concerned about space and don’t care about quality go av1)
But you do you
Blu-rays are compressed. “Zipping a zip file” doesn’t apply here because zips are lossless. Video encoding is almost entirely lossy, and there’s a lot of tradeoffs to be made between file size and quality. The whole point of the more efficient codecs is to minimize the quality tradeoff. There’s also a bunch of parameters to tune the resulting bitrate which is the #1 factor in deciding the final filesize.
That being said, I’ll agree that the least quality loss will come from using a Blu-ray remux since those are very high quality.
Blu-rays are compressed.
All streaming data is compressed at some point. I clearly meant not over-compressed. 4K video or UHD BD can both be taken from their original states and processed through HEVC to get crisp 1080p h265 10bit at a steep data discount. But it’ll take a very long time to process. It’s simply not worth it.
“Zipping a zip file” doesn’t apply here because zips are lossless.
It’s a figurative expression and I feel that was pretty damn obvious…
In my opinion the ideal x265 size/speed/quality is using a tuned slow preset, perhaps with filtering if the source is grainy. A test encode or few should be done to determine an ideal CRF per source.
Since you don’t seem very familiar with x265, I would just stick with the defaults in slow preset, but consider using aq-mode 3 or 5 (only available in the patman mod). You can also adjust the aq-strength to help control the resulting size somewhat, I wouldn’t go lower than 0.5.
Thank you for the input! I’m unsure what aq-mode is but I’m sure it’s somewhere in FastFlix. There’s tons of settings in it that I need to look over. The default CRF for HEVC in that program is 22 and I don’t know if I should go higher, lower or what but I appreciate your insight.
CRF 18 is usually where I start at, but that is focusing on quality. I’d imagine you would want a higher starting point.
If you want to find out what different options are or do, the docs are a good place to start: https://x265.readthedocs.io/en/master/cli.html
Thank you for the input and reference material. I’ll give it a look-through and appreciate your time.
