[JamesSwift]

Uhh, not in my experience. Its extremely difficult to find h265 sources for a large majority of content. Its basically a meme where if you tell people you want to try and get h265 by default, they talk down to you like "why would you do that".

From https://trash-guides.info/Misc/x265-4k/

> Something like 95% of video files are x264 and have much better direct play support.

[babypuncher]

That info seems a little out of date. The utility of h.265 at resolutions below 1080p can be questionable, but everything these days is 1080p or 4k.

Hardware support has also been ubiquitous for a while now. iPhones have had it since 2016. I usually "move on" to the next codec for my encodes once I run out of hardware that doesn't support it, and that happened for me with h.265 in 2019. My iPad, laptop, and Shield TV are still holding me back from bothering with AV1. Though with how slow it is, I might stick with h.265 anyways.

[JamesSwift]

The guide isnt saying 95% of source content is h264. Its saying 95% of files you would download when pirating are h264. The scene, by and large, is transcoding h265 4k to h264 720/1080. The 4k h265 is available but its considered the 'premium' option.

[Izkata]

The scene maybe, but outside of the scene and into general uploads I'd say it's more like 80% h265.

[babypuncher]

Most 1080p encodes I see on pirate bay are h.265 these days.

But frankly, most of what "the scene" produces it trash. I gave up on waiting for proper blu-rays for the remaining seasons of Bojack Horseman and pirated them a few weeks ago, and all the options were compromised. The best visual quality came from a set that was h.265 encoded with a reasonable average bitrate, yet the quality still did not reflect the bitrate at all, with obvious artifacting in fades and scenes with lots of motion. I usually get much better results at only slightly larger file sizes with my own blu-ray rips.

I'm pretty sure the key difference is that I go for a variable bitrate with a constant quality, whereas most scene groups want to hit an arbitrary file size for every episode regardless of whether or not that is feasible for the content. Every episode in this set is almost exactly 266 MB, whereas similar shows that I rip will vary anywhere from 200 to 350 MB per episode.

[JamesSwift]

Yeah, tv shows are tough. I should caveat that I'm talking mostly about movies. I find a _lot_ more 265 content for tv shows. I also am generally on usenet rather than torrenting.

[babypuncher]

That makes sense, a 20-40% space savings means a lot more for 6 seasons of TV than it does for one 2-hour movie.

[kuschku]

> Hardware support has also been ubiquitous for a while now.

With how limited browser support for h265 is, I always have to encode an h264 version anyway.

At that point I just encode a 720p h264, a 1080p h264, and a 4K HDR AV1 encode of all media I store.

[babypuncher]

That's on the browser vendors.

Google added HEVC support to Chrome in 104. It relies on decoders exposed by the host OS, negating the need to license a software decoder.

There's no reason Firefox couldn't do the same.

EDIT: Apparently, similar support showed up in nightly Firefox builds late last year, hidden behind `media.wmf.hevc.enabled`

[kuschku]

> There's no reason Firefox couldn't do the same.

> It relies on decoders exposed by the host OS, negating the need to license a software decoder.

Windows requires you to pay (!) to get access to h265 decoding. Someone needs to license the decoder at some point, and that means you'll have to pay for it one way or the other.

[babypuncher]

But the GPU vendors already provide this directly (Nvidia, Intel, and AMD). It can absolutely be done at no extra cost to the user. There are also open source software decoders that can be installed and play nice with WMF.

[kuschku]

> But the GPU vendors already provide this directly (Nvidia, Intel, and AMD). It can absolutely be done at no extra cost to the user. There are also open source software decoders that can be installed and play nice with WMF.

Somehow I doubt that Nouveau or the in-kernel AMDGPU have paid the license fee for HEVC decoding, or that it works well with WMF...

[dspillett]

> Uhh, not in my experience. Its extremely difficult to find h265 sources for a large majority of content.

Sounds like you need some new sources. For now content I generally see x264 and x265 for just about everything. 264 isn't going anywhere because many older design set top boxes (including those still running Kodi on Pi3s) don't have hardware decode support, but 265 has become the default for 4K (which older kit doesn't support anyway) with 1080 & 720 being commonly available in both.

Admittedly some of the 265 encodes are recompressions of larger 264 sources and sometimes bad settings in either encode (including just choosing an already overly crunched source) show through, but that isn't common enough to be problematical (my usual complaint is that encodes like that strip subs, though that is useful: avoiding 265 encodes with no subs avoids the other issues mostly too).

Few are going back and making 265 encodes for older sources, so that may be an issue you've faced, but if that content has a new BR release or other re-release (like when B5 got a slightly remastered version on one of the streamers) then you'll get both formats in the common resolutions.

[SirMaster]

That's not my experience at all.

I mean I've gone all 4K/HDR a number of years ago, and all streaming 4K and disc 4K is HEVC. So all the piracy content is WEB-DLs or UHD disc rips of that and it is often not re-converted, but even if it it tey still use HEVC.

H.264 is a fine codec, but it doesn't support HDR and also really starts to show its weakness in efficiency at 4K resolution. At 1080p SDR it fairs much better vs HEVC.