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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Xanza@lemm.ee 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

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.

[+] fakeplastic@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 1 month ago (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] Xanza@lemm.ee 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] rice@lemmy.org 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

If a file is 5000kbps and you use 3000kbps you now have 25-50% savings like he just said. Nothing is overestimated, you can encode to w/e you want. This is how lossy encoding works, for everything.

[–] Chewy7324@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yes, but the point is keeping the quality the same. If you reencode a 5000 kbps x264 Blu-ray encode to 3000kbps x265 you will have visibly worse quality.
If you encode the corresponding Blu-ray remux with x265 to 3000 kbps the result will likely be nearly indistinguishable from the 5000 kbps x264 encode.

For OP: I also prefer smaller releases so I download mostly h265 WEB-DLs. They are usually around 3000-5000 kbps (1.3-2.3GB/hour) and look fine (especially as they usually come with HDR).
Redownloading WEB-DLs in the right size will give you the best quality for the small size (and saves energy, depending on where you live).

[–] rice@lemmy.org 3 points 1 month ago

just fyi x264 and x265 are programs, written by VideoLAN organization. h264 and h265 are the codecs

And no doing that is no guarantee in visibly worse quality. Depends entirely on the video in that scenario. Plenty of them will look almost the same (though h265 is a lot blurrier than 264, I'd say h264 to h264 you're likely to barely notice)

[–] Xanza@lemm.ee 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This number is taken from the Wikipedia page, and represents a lab setting from totally uncompressed to full HEVC encoding. It's not representative of data savings that you get from one video codec vs another, which is likely less than 4-6% between something like VP9 and HEVC... The 25-50% of completely fucking laughable in a realistic setting and you look like and idiot for bringing it up.
It's absolutely an overestimation by every conceivable metric available.
You can encode to whatever you want, but if you take a VP9 encoded video and re-encode it, you may only save 1% and it will take several hours to encode. There are even situations where you will save nothing, or the resultant video file is actually larger even with HEVC.

It's zipping a zip file. Endlessly re-compressing things doesn't yield positive results in the way you describe.

[–] rice@lemmy.org 2 points 1 month ago

It’s zipping a zip file. E

no it isn't, zipping is lossless. encoding is lossy.

[–] ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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

[+] fakeplastic@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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

[–] rice@lemmy.org 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

it will result in visible and audible distortion

This is completely wrong, it "might" be visible is accurate. The actual answer is "that depends"

[–] ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 month ago

That’s correct, I misspoke, I clarified that with the rest of my post though

[–] rice@lemmy.org 2 points 1 month ago

Lossy to lossy generally doesn't matter, that is why people transcode over the web on their media players and the video seems fine, they are doing lossy to lossy on the fly there. What is actually stupid is saving media that is 100gb that you ALWAYS have to transcode to play, so no matter what you're ramping up your wattage use to play a file. This is also why 99.9999% of consumed media is compressed, you can't play it otherwise. Internet would explode too.

Likewise can size a jpeg down from 4000kb to 1000kb and it'll likely be almost identical and good enough for most cases. There are certainly zero handheld devices you'd be able to notice it on.** If you size the 4000kb to 40kb now there will be an actual noticeable difference. There are different levels to all of this. **

Similarly a 100mb wav file should be a 10mb mp3 and you can't tell the difference. You couldn't even tell the difference with a 3mb mp3 file.

[–] jerb@lemmy.croc.pw 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Xanza@lemm.ee -2 points 1 month ago

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...

[–] rice@lemmy.org 1 points 1 month ago

you can re-encode something at literally any bitrate, this isn't relatable at all to "zipping a zip file" this is "opening a zip file, opening the document inside, removing data you don't need, resaving it and rezipping it"