The best codec currently available?

[sophisticles]

In my opinion, based on the latest builds that I have been testing, has to be x265. I'll admit that there was a time not to long ago my opinion of x265 was mixed, at times it seemed to give great results and at times it seemed to produce soft, blurry encodes but I recently decided to revisit it in a round about sort of way.

I use Ubuntu and though I usually encode via a custom compiled ffmpeg build I decided to see how Hybrid on Linux was progressing and installed the latest build. As I was looking through some of the options I ran across some new options for x265 that I had not heard of, namely:

Motion Based Adaptive Quantization

SSIM RD

RC grain

After a few test encodes I started thinking that the x265 developers were onto something special so I decided to do a comparison against x264+placebo.

The test source is the following file:

https://mango.blender.org/production/4k-dcp-available-for-testing/

3rd link, named tos_dcp_test_04.zip

I used Ubuntu 16.04.3 with all the updates installed, a Xeon E3-1241, 16 GB ddr3 1600 (iirc), Hybrid, x264 with the placebo preset and x265 with the ultra fast preset with the following changes:

AQ was set to normal
Motion Based AQ was enabled
CU Tree was enabled
RDO level was set to 3
References was set to No Limit
RDO Quantization level was set to 2
Psycho-visual RDO was set to 2
Psy-RDO Quantization was set to 1
SSIM RD and RC grain were both enabled

CRF 18 was used for x264 and 2 pass was set for x265, with the target bit rate set to match the x264 encode, the x265 encode ended up being a bit smaller due to a bit less bit rate used.

Attached you will find the 2 test encodes, I also included 2 other test encodes I did with the same source.

The x264+placebo took just under 13 minutes 58 seconds to finish encoding, the x265 encode took just over 4 minutes 10 seconds for the first pass to finish and just over 4 minutes 21 seconds for the second pass to finish.

Based on my tests I see no reason to use anything other than x265 with the above reference options for encodes unless you need to target a specific device that doesn't support hevc.

Has anyone else been experimenting with these options and how do your findings compare to mine?

[LigH.de]

I did not anymore, in the last few years. Too many people with either more or less knowledge than me, but certainly with a different "sweet spot" in the Bermuda triangle between speed, quality, and convenience, did the same already, so I decided I won't be able to enrich lives with yet another comparison; neither my own life, nor that of others.

[Hoser Rob]

... there was a time not to long ago my opinion of x265 was mixed, at times it seemed to give great results and at times it seemed to produce soft, blurry encodes ...

That;s because you didn't know how to use it, which is the thing with new codecs with all those lovely new options. Don't blame the format.

[Bernix]

Deleted

[sophisticles]

... there was a time not to long ago my opinion of x265 was mixed, at times it seemed to give great results and at times it seemed to produce soft, blurry encodes ...

That;s because you didn't know how to use it, which is the thing with new codecs with all those lovely new options. Don't blame the format.

What a silly response, if I just use the presets and with one source file it gives me a great encode and with another source it gave me a soft blurry encode then what is there to know how to use.

Near as I can tell the options I mentioned, SSIM RD, RC grain and motion based AQ are new additions to the encoder and seem to make a big difference.

But feel free to spout nonsense.

[LigH.de]

There is no nonsense. The quality of the result may differ in relation to several attributes of the source video content: More or less motion / grain / structured details / sharpness ... some scenes are easy to compress without obvious artefacts, others provoke differences to appear more annoying.

The pros and cons of SAO vs. detail retention have been discussed over months, not only here, but also in the doom9 forum, and possibly elsewhere too.

[Cornucopia]

@Bernix, besides your post being off-topic enough to warrant a new thread, I would be reluctant to use anything from Kingsoft which seems to only make derivative knockoffs (and not particularly good ones). And I'm tired of MSU pulling these money-making "report upgrade" buy-in schemes. I don't trust them anymore.

@sophisticles, any comparison of these features is meaningless if you are only comparing using 1 source/type of picture. Sounds like you're just trying to stir up controversy. Those settings options should be used WHEN APPROPRIATE for the title. But you can still get great h265 encodes (often better than h264) without them, again depending on material.

Scott

[Bernix]

So I wish to delete post, but it is impossible.
Thank you

Bernix

[redwudz]

So I wish to delete post, but it is impossible.
Thank you

Bernix

You can replace the text in a post with the word 'EDIT' or similar to effectively delete it.

[Bernix]

Hi redwuz,
I am aware of that. But it would lead to chaos in thread. But O.K.

Bernix