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?

  • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.deEnglish
    632·
    7 months ago

    x265 playback is more demanding than x264 playback

    By a factor of 2 with the same bitrate. But you only need half the bitrate for the same quality (SNR) so it really isn’t.

    However, encoding is about 10x more demanding in terms of bitrate, or 5x for the same quality. This may be worth it for long-term storage or wide distribution over limited bandwidth (torrenting), but not for one-time personal use.

      • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.comEnglish
        101·
        7 months ago

        Only if you’re disk limited or bandwidth limited. And in many cases will lead to transcoding the content, which could be a problem if you’re CPU limited or have no GPU for hardware transcoding.

        Everything (not literally… but figuratively) can do x264. Not everything can do x265…

      • JbIPS@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        7 months ago

        Did you do something specific to play x265 on JellyFin? Last time I tried, the video kept crashing every 5-8minutes, even with a low bitrate threshold.