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  1. Nowadays a lot of video is H.264 or H.265.. I am not going to touch those.. but what about older videos that are XviD/MPEG-4/MPEG-2/AVC or whatever else.. I'm wondering if I should consider try encoding to H.265 using lossless.. I'm thinking maybe I can save a bunch of space?
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  2. Member Cornucopia's Avatar
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    You can encode to h265 and save lots of space. And you can encode to h265 in lossless mode (or even near-lossless). But you can't do both together.
    A lossy re-encoding that is efficient enough to save considerable space will be lossy enough to lose quality (compared to you existing source).

    Ask yourself: do you have the time (to encode)? do you have fully-h265-capable decoding in all your existing or near-future devices/apps? do you have any older assets that are soon in danger of becoming so outdated that they will be non-playable? When these are all yes, encode to h265, or if only the last is yes, continue encoding to h264 -- when necessary to bring fragile legacy formats current.

    Anything else, leave them alone. This includes basically the whole mpeg family (everything you mentioned).

    Btw, you may have been confused, but AVC is h264. Oh and save your originals regardless.

    Scott
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  3. You are probably right. I was just opening random files and writing down some of the mediainfo. So I may have wrote AVC in error.

    But I think what you are saying is pretty much everything I have don't re-encode except for XviD. I've got over 10 thousand videos. I only opened a few to see their mediainfo.

    Do I have time to encode? Sure. I am sure I can set a batch mode while I sleep. Everything I have runs h.265.. cell phone, desktop, chromecast 1, chromecast ultra.

    You wrote save your originals regardless. Why so? The whole point is to save file space.. if I have to save them then it's just going to add to my space. I could use a backup of my files, but I'd rather back up the smaller files.

    I could do h.264 if it's lossless and still saving me space. I just mentioned h.265 since a lot of people are encoding in that now and they're good quality I'm getting at really small filesizes.

    Originally Posted by Cornucopia View Post
    You can encode to h265 and save lots of space. And you can encode to h265 in lossless mode (or even near-lossless). But you can't do both together.
    A lossy re-encoding that is efficient enough to save considerable space will be lossy enough to lose quality (compared to you existing source).

    Ask yourself: do you have the time (to encode)? do you have fully-h265-capable decoding in all your existing or near-future devices/apps? do you have any older assets that are soon in danger of becoming so outdated that they will be non-playable? When these are all yes, encode to h265, or if only the last is yes, continue encoding to h264 -- when necessary to bring fragile legacy formats current.

    Anything else, leave them alone. This includes basically the whole mpeg family (everything you mentioned).

    Btw, you may have been confused, but AVC is h264. Oh and save your originals regardless.

    Scott
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  4. Member Cornucopia's Avatar
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    Xvid (aka Divx) is basically MPEG4 ASP, so also part of the mpeg family.

    I thought the whole point was to try to save space while maintaining quality?
    Do what you wanna do, but lose the originals and you lose your chance to improve upon your re-encodes with subsequent (better?) codecs and more skill/knowledge/experience. Space is cheap.

    Remember, if you have an xvid clip that is e.g. 10GB and is only 60% the quality of the master source, and you make an h265 clip from it that is 3.5GB and 80% of the quality of the 1st clip, that means it is still only 48% (60% * 80%) of the master source.
    Only you can be the judge of whether it is worth it for you. I'm just giving you warnings from experience & educated guesses.

    Scott
    Last edited by Cornucopia; 7th Nov 2017 at 01:39.
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  5. Originally Posted by yuppicide0138 View Post
    I'm wondering if I should consider try encoding to H.265 using lossless.. I'm thinking maybe I can save a bunch of space?
    Not only will you not save any space, but lossless will cause the file sizes to balloon in size. It's an idea born from ignorance. You can reencode them and save a lot of space but, as Cornucopia makes clear, don't delude yourself that you'll be retaining all the quality of your 'sources'. Why not just encode one and discover it for yourself?
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  6. not sure if 2nd gen reencoding will save that much space.. also every generation recode there's a loss of quality..
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    Compared to uncompressed video (usually YUV 4:2:0 ~ YV12), efficient codecs can reduce the size to a ratio of one to several hundred, possibly a thousand, with "acceptable" loss of quality. In contrast, lossless compression has a typical compression ratio of 1:3, at best about 1:5, compared to uncompressed YUV (which will require hundreds of GB or even some TB for a HD or UHD movie in full playing time).
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  8. In general, H.265 has several big advantages over H.264, including better compression, delicate image and bandwidth saving.
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  9. Originally Posted by yuppicide0138 View Post
    Nowadays a lot of video is H.264 or H.265.. I am not going to touch those.. but what about older videos that are XviD/MPEG-4/MPEG-2/AVC or whatever else.. I'm wondering if I should consider try encoding to H.265 using lossless.. I'm thinking maybe I can save a bunch of space?
    You may be disappointed with gain - newer codecs are better for high (HD) and higher (UHD) sources - SD results will be worse than promised - if you really wish to recompress SD, IMHO there is no sense to go over H.264. And lossless will provide bigger file than source (unless your source is not compressed at all).
    Currently i'm doing something like this (need to save GiB's) but my goal is better compression not lossless compression - H.264 with CRF around 26 - 28 will reduce bitrate of well compressed XVid by half. (i have plenty of documential movies where quality is less important than information embedded in those movies).
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