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?
I’ve done a bunch of transcoding of things to x265 in the past (as I’m sure everyone is aware transcoding isn’t GREAT but cuts down on storage costs). With that said I’ve now moved to AV1. I don’t use GPU encoders at all as I found the quality to be pretty terrible. I just use a custom written ZSH script to go through and check the current format (it also converts audio to OPUS too)