GUI for x265?

[kyrcy]

I read that x265 is much better than x264, but is there a GUI available similar to the one that comes with x264vfw?

[ezcapper]

There are many I think. I have an imperfect one called yax265 gui, but most people like selur's hybrid, x265gui, handbrake, avidemux, SUPER, and others

[pippas]

I've found the portable Baka x.265 GUI quite useful for experimenting....

[hello_hello]

Is x265 currently better than x264? It's still relatively early days for the x265 encoder's development and I'm not sure it's ready for prime time yet (someone else will probably know), and there's almost zero hardware player support for h265 video so you'd need to be happy playing your encodes on a PC for the moment.

I don't know if x265 will necessarily be better than x264 in respect to quality as such, except one day it'll no doubt produce the same or similar quality as x264 at a lower bitrate, however I'm not sure how much of a bitrate advantage it has at the moment, and I think it's still much slower than x264.

[poisondeathray]

He's probably looking for a VFW version, I don't think there is one

Right now, x265 is much better only in specific scenarios - such as at very low bitrates, and UHD resolutions, and smooth animation like simple cartoons. There is no contest in those scenarios - it's not even close

But it actually performs worse (at least subjectively) in more typical cases like 1080p, 720p, regular content like movies, typical video, etc... in the low to middle bitrate range . The main complaint is it seems to have more difficultly retaining details and textures right now compared to x264. That's basically what set x264 apart from other AVC encoders in the past, where the others tended to "smooth" details away. However, that should improve

The speed has drastically improved over the last few months. It used to be 10x slower, easily, but now it's maybe only 2-3x slower.

[Macadamia]

But it actually performs worse (at least subjectively) in more typical cases like 1080p, 720p, regular content like movies, typical video, etc...

My experience tends to differ, especially on 1080p videos, from all kind of sources (Bluray, DSLR, h264 Videos with high bitrate).
While using x264 10-bit, I have never been able to produce anything close to the quality i currently manage to get from x265.

My encodes are meant to be watched on my home HD TV (32" Led), and they never show any color banding, or loss of details (except for grain on low bitrate ones).
I have limited space and many videos (blame my DSLR ), and size is often a big issue. But i still need decent quality, and i am really pleased so far.

I use Hybrid encoder, my x265 (v1.7+382 currently) profile is main10, fast preset, target bitrate from 2000 to 3500kb/s (depending on how important the video is for me), 2-pass encoding with slow first pass.
As you guessed, the resulting encodes are from 900MB to 1.6GB per hour, and most of them look great, unless the source itself is really bad.
The tests i ran using x264 were not as satisfying, that's why i completely switched to x265 in spite of the slow speed.

I have seen samples of very tiny h264 encodes that were surprisingly nice, but the loss of detail or artifacts are clearly more noticeable for similar sources, even with really highly tuned settings (although i am sure some experts could do better).

I know visual quality can be subjective, and yes i admit i am not a great fan of grain (although i very rarely filter it out), and had issues with it on some of my encodes, so i might decide to use some filter such as NeatVideo, but that's costly and tends to smooth the picture a bit too much for my own taste.

Looking at h265 vs h264 standards specs, it seems obvious that h265 is dedicated to offer a much better compression on high resolution sources, but i still think it starts showing clear benefits with FullHD.

Please don't start flaming me with ultra advanced settings on x264, i don't use any for x265, and i mostly use defaults with no --tune on my fast presets, and i simply don't have the time for placebo. But i would clearly change my mind if someone would show me x264 videos of the same size (let's say 1GB per hour) with as much detail preserved.

Note that i haven't compared both encoders at high bitrates, so i wouldn't be able to give a reliable opinion in that case.

I hope this helps !

PS : Sorry if i made some mistakes, but English is not my mother language.