superstition
Platinum Member
I have tested CPU encoding with an AMD FX 8 core and an Nvidia GTX 460. I've used Handbrake and Sorenson.
I used Babylon 5 film DVDs for the testing.
What I found is H.265 dramatically outperforming H.264 in terms of quality for MB. The final setting I was pleased with (Handbrake) was 17 quality and "very slow" setting. The problem is that very slow is extremely slow and takes over two days with the FX chip to encode a single DVD. The chip is not fully-loaded at all, unlike with H.264. Days to encode a single DVD is unfortunate but the quality boost over "slow" is noticeable as is the size difference. However, with the FX I would stick with the "slow" setting because it takes like 8 hours.
I assume this is because I have read that parallelization of video encoding and quality are opposing. The more quality you want the more serial the process is. This appears to be seen in the way H.265, as I recall, does load the processor heavily with a fast low-quality setting like "medium."
Another interesting thing I found is that H.264, at least with Handbrake, is heavily sensitive to temporal noise, in terms of bloating the file size. This makes it necessary to use noise filtering to keep the file size down. However, I tried various algorithms for that and quality was always noticeably lost. With H.265 I was surprised to see a lot of temporal noise (in some scenes of the Babylon 5 stuff) having minimal effect on file size. It's still annoying (the noise) but it's better to leave it in than it is to overly blur people's faces.
I also found that Nvidia's GPU encoding of H.264 was terrible although the encoding was fast. This suggests, again, the point that heavy parallelization means low quality. Maybe more recent Nvidia cards have improved quality but I am really not interested in H.264 at all because it's so much less effective than H.265 in terms of preserving quality at low file sizes. Why bother encoding at all if the file size is going to be so bloated?
The question I have is: Are there any reviews that show, clearly, the quality of Skylake's H.265 encoding versus something like Handbrake on "very slow"?
If it's just fast, but has mediocre quality and/or file size then I'll be disappointed. However, if it provides at least the "slow" quality of Handbrake with fast speed then it would be quite an improvement over 8 hours of encoding time for one DVD.
I used Babylon 5 film DVDs for the testing.
What I found is H.265 dramatically outperforming H.264 in terms of quality for MB. The final setting I was pleased with (Handbrake) was 17 quality and "very slow" setting. The problem is that very slow is extremely slow and takes over two days with the FX chip to encode a single DVD. The chip is not fully-loaded at all, unlike with H.264. Days to encode a single DVD is unfortunate but the quality boost over "slow" is noticeable as is the size difference. However, with the FX I would stick with the "slow" setting because it takes like 8 hours.
I assume this is because I have read that parallelization of video encoding and quality are opposing. The more quality you want the more serial the process is. This appears to be seen in the way H.265, as I recall, does load the processor heavily with a fast low-quality setting like "medium."
Another interesting thing I found is that H.264, at least with Handbrake, is heavily sensitive to temporal noise, in terms of bloating the file size. This makes it necessary to use noise filtering to keep the file size down. However, I tried various algorithms for that and quality was always noticeably lost. With H.265 I was surprised to see a lot of temporal noise (in some scenes of the Babylon 5 stuff) having minimal effect on file size. It's still annoying (the noise) but it's better to leave it in than it is to overly blur people's faces.
I also found that Nvidia's GPU encoding of H.264 was terrible although the encoding was fast. This suggests, again, the point that heavy parallelization means low quality. Maybe more recent Nvidia cards have improved quality but I am really not interested in H.264 at all because it's so much less effective than H.265 in terms of preserving quality at low file sizes. Why bother encoding at all if the file size is going to be so bloated?
The question I have is: Are there any reviews that show, clearly, the quality of Skylake's H.265 encoding versus something like Handbrake on "very slow"?
If it's just fast, but has mediocre quality and/or file size then I'll be disappointed. However, if it provides at least the "slow" quality of Handbrake with fast speed then it would be quite an improvement over 8 hours of encoding time for one DVD.
