For those of you that torrent video files this question is geared toward you. I'm looking for a sweet spot between quality, size & speed for HEVC encoding. I'm using FastFlix and seem to be getting really wide and varying speeds.

I'm not really literate on all this video lingo but I can, at least, get it going. Most files take anywhere from 5-17 mins for a 30-40 mins clip. I have a AMD Radeon RX 470 graphics card but when I try and use the VCEEnc it won't let me use CRF which I've heard it the best way.

Anyway, if you're willing to share knowledge or what settings you use when you convert video to HEVC that might help me speed up my processing, I would be eternally grateful.

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[–] Xanza@lemm.ee 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (16 children)

I'm confused... Are you grabbing pirated video files from the net and re-encoding them... If you're attempting to further compress already compressed video, you're just zipping a zip file. It's crazy and you'll do nothing but bloat the file size (versus a properly compressed video file) and further reduce the quality of the video via artifacts. I'll call the police and have you committed right now.

If you're grabbing 8/4k or UHD BD movies and re-encoding them into lets say, 1080p HEVC 10bit, I could see that being worth it if you really love the movie (and have 5 days with nothing to do), but only if you're going from an inferior compression to better (h264 to h265), otherwise like I said, you're zipping a zip file.

[–] fakeplastic@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 1 day ago (12 children)

you'll do nothing but bloat the file size

That's very wrong. Going from h.264 to h.265 cuts file size down to 25-50% of the original. That's what the HE is for in HEVC.

[–] ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 1 day ago (2 children)

You’re correct that it will reduce file size but encoding lossy to lossy is foolish. You will introduce compression artifacts and have an objectively worse quality image, the encode will take much longer than if you used a proper lossless source, and if you don’t set your configs right you’ll strip out subtitles, tags, chapters, etc

Additionally if the h264 was already compressed by a lot h265 won’t save all that much space, giving you all the downsides with basically no upside

Only dummies encode lossy>lossy. The debate about lossy>h265 is one thing (h265 is not for archival) but h264>h265 will result in visible distortion

[–] fakeplastic@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I also went through the phase where I thought I was an audiophile/videophile and everything I collected needed to be in ultra high quality. Eventually I realized it was stupid and now I spend a third as much money on storage and still have perfectly fine media that I have no issues with in practice despite the flaws I'm supposed to see in theory.

[–] ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I don’t understand what you are arguing?

If you’re arguing that downloading remuxes and only flac is foolish then yeah, 99.8% of the time h264 and 320 mp3 are going to be indistinguishable on most setups with most content. H265 will be the same on like 99.5% of setups with slightly less content and will save tons of space. Sure. But this assumes the lossy encodes were done properly from a lossless master

if you encode lossy to lossy it will result in visible and audible distortion of the image and audio. Sometimes it’s minimal, sometimes it’s quite bad, sometimes it’s masked by your equipment, but it’s always there. Further, you’d spend more money on electricity running your cpu on full blast encoding terabytes of video files when you could simply just redownload your library in whatever format by someone who knows what they’re doing (if you’re so concerned about space and don’t care about quality go av1)

But you do you

[–] rice@lemmy.org 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

it will result in visible and audible distortion

This is completely wrong, it "might" be visible is accurate. The actual answer is "that depends"

[–] ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago

That’s correct, I misspoke, I clarified that with the rest of my post though

[–] rice@lemmy.org 2 points 1 day ago

Lossy to lossy generally doesn't matter, that is why people transcode over the web on their media players and the video seems fine, they are doing lossy to lossy on the fly there. What is actually stupid is saving media that is 100gb that you ALWAYS have to transcode to play, so no matter what you're ramping up your wattage use to play a file. This is also why 99.9999% of consumed media is compressed, you can't play it otherwise. Internet would explode too.

Likewise can size a jpeg down from 4000kb to 1000kb and it'll likely be almost identical and good enough for most cases. There are certainly zero handheld devices you'd be able to notice it on.** If you size the 4000kb to 40kb now there will be an actual noticeable difference. There are different levels to all of this. **

Similarly a 100mb wav file should be a 10mb mp3 and you can't tell the difference. You couldn't even tell the difference with a 3mb mp3 file.

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