Is x265 encoding worth it?

[._. Bankes]

I heard it takes a lot of time and doesn't offer enough compression. i was thinking at maybe attempting it myself but i want to her about peoples experiences with it.

[Catar]

complicated question, to be honest. There are pros to H265/HEVC, especially in the realm of HDR content (which AVC/H264 does not support). There are also plenty of cons. I'm not particularly experienced in encoding myself, so I'm just going to trot out the same answer I've been pasting for a while now, from notthegrinch (one of the most knowledgeable people in encoding on the internet):

 

 

this is explaining rules on PTP, generally considered the best private movie tracker. (this post is about four months old now, but still accurate)

[slick1109]

In my opinion the only real benefit to H265 is HDR.  The UltraHD Blurays look good, but I do not see the same results from h265 encodes (or should I say Transcodes) I have seen online.  It also takes a ridiculous amount of time to Transcode, so I hope you have a newer High end processor.  I tried it twice now myself, and both times it took nearly a whole day to finish transcoding a short video.

 

Personally I am more interested in the new Open Source Codecs being worked on, "AV1" is the main one, and I just read about another one recently called "xvc".

 

[Koby]

Heh, I already take 30-40 hours encoding a movie in x264 10-bit, although because of avisynth filters bottle-necking the encode and only using like half the CPU so I could actually run multiple movie encodes at once for better productivity. In any case, I'm not interested in spending a whole week on a single movie for no added benefit.

 

As mentioned above, the only reason at this point to use x265 is for 4K HDR purposes; which I've never set out to do myself, thus I don't use it. For 1080p or lower SDR releases, you get better results and much faster with x264.

[Hark0n]

7 hours ago, Catar said:

complicated question, to be honest. There are pros to H265/HEVC, especially in the realm of HDR content (which AVC/H264 does not support). There are also plenty of cons. I'm not particularly experienced in encoding myself, so I'm just going to trot out the same answer I've been pasting for a while now, from notthegrinch (one of the most knowledgeable people in encoding on the internet):

 

 

this is explaining rules on PTP, generally considered the best private movie tracker. (this post is about four months old now, but still accurate)

First, that post is more than four months old now - that or you are time traveling, as you did post it here more than five months ago.

 

As for the points made in that post, some can be debated on.

• Anime encodes often use 10bit AVC and it has no hardware support, while HEVC has some
• Encoding speed is not something that consumer should base their choice on - as long as decode is fast enough, it is not an issue. In this case though, there is no clear improvement in compression, so it is wasted time, but if there was improvement, extra time could be justified
• "x265 is barely understood" and "Nobody really knows how to tweak the settings for better results" are very broad statements and could easily be wrong. There are groups that have been using it for several years and likely have some knowledge about how to tweak the settings for better results

 

That all being said, I am not in favor of HEVC, I am simply stating that some points used to dismiss it in past may have changed over time.

 

 

As for HDR, to me it seems like a mess of 6 (or more) different standards that have different capabilities, prices and users (BDs use one, streaming uses another and HDTV use yet another one). Some of those supposedly can work on even AVC.

Because most HDR standards require hardware support, it might be best to wait until industry has "settled down" and are no longer releasing new ones.