Nearing the filling of my 14.5TB hard drive and wanting to wait a bit longer before shelling out for a 60TB raid array, I’ve been trying to replace as many x264 releases in my collection with x265 releases of equivalent quality. While popular movies are usually available in x265, less popular ones and TV shows usually have fewer x265 options available, with low quality MeGusta encodes often being the only x265 option.

While x265 playback is more demanding than x264 playback, its compatibility is much closer to x264 than the new x266 codec. Is there a reason many release groups still opt for x264 over x265?

  • @[email protected]English
    127•9 months ago

    A lot of TV shows are direct rips from streaming services and they don’t use H.265 because of the ridiculous licensing it comes with.

    I suspect AV1 will become much more popular for streaming in a few years when the hardware support becomes more common. It’s an open source codec, so licensing shouldn’t be an issue. Then we will see a lot more AV1 releases.

      • ShimitarEnglish
        12•9 months ago

        In my experience, you always gain space savings going av1 from 264 and 265 as well. For me its always been significant savings at the same quality level.

        Ofc YMMV and use a very recent ffmpeg with the best av1 libraries.

      • bjorneyEnglish
        10•9 months ago

        In my experience about ~8% better but 4x slower to transcode