OT - video compression HEVC woo cool!

James Hale james at thehales.id.au
Wed Feb 15 02:45:09 EST 2017


Recently in a discussion on the data grid someone mentioned Trevor's DG presentations at runrev09. Grabbing my revLive09 disks I loaded up the relevant DVD.
However I am not a great fan of DVDs these days and thought I would copy onto my hard disk. I also am not that keen on the Mac DVD player so I thought I would rip and compress. The DVD was single sided so took about 4.3GB.
I decided to use Handbrake which I had recently modified to use the 10 bit x265 (HEVC) libraries. I processed the three presentations on the disk and ended up with three files totaling 480MB. The settings I used were not very aggressive as I used my std settings for bd's. I know x265 is good. I also know x264 would have done a passable job but not of the same order.
In short, if you have a need to compress/convert video to h264 I would consider trying h265. Of course it depends on your use but it really is impressive.
Btw I use the 10bit versions of the binaries as they seem to offer a better looking image at the same settings as 8bit compressions even when the source is 8bit.
For those on the Mac, "iffMpeg" is a really nice interface for FFMPEG. One of the sites providing precompiled Mac binaries of FFMPEG consented to compiling a 10 bit x264/265 binary as well. So either handbrake (free) or iffmpeg (not free) are really great choices to get great compression with little loss of quality.

James

BTW re the quality. The files I rip to place as back ups on my server I view on a 55" HD screen. Trust me, I would know if the x265s were not as good as an x264 version. The size reduction x264->x265 is one quarter to one third. E.g x264 at 3.7GB -> x265 910bit) at 800MB I have yet to pick a difference visually. You can of course compress more aggressively but then you would notice.




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