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?
In order to encode to a specific format without unintentionally losing quality, doesn’t the initial file have to be a remux?
Yes, that’s right. But the point stands, you indeed shouldn’t do such encoding on the GPU, it’s a tradeoff of (fast) speed vs (poor) quality and (big) size. Good for when you need realtime encoding.
Indeed, but YMMV and to me quality is still good if source was not a remix but a top quality encoding
You can downsample from BluRay, which would give you least loss.
But if you only have some good h264 version and want space savings, you can also reencode that, while probably loosing some small amount of quality, depending on your settings.