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Handbrake now includes H.265 but....

absolut_mac

absolut_mac

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Oct 30, 2003
934
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Dallas, Texas
I thought it better to put this question in a separate post.

I just downloaded the latest version of Handbrake which now includes both H.264 & H.265 video encoding. I did a trial run on an MKV file in order to compare the differences. The latter is about half the size of H.264, but sadly it won't won't play on any software that I have - VLC, QT 7 with Perian etc. Any suggestions for trouble free playback?
 
Zwhaler said:
http://www.divx.com/en/software/hevc-plugin
Click to expand...

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but this plug-in doesn't work with QT 7. What software is this plug-in supposed to work with or does it only work with their DivX player?

Also, I thought that this plug-in is free, but then it asks me for my plug-in serial number, and to purchase one if I don't have one. Maybe it just doesn't work with Handbrake's H.265 encoding?

Have you actually used this plug-in or is your recommendation based on someone else's opinion of it?
 
absolut_mac said:
Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but this plug-in doesn't work with QT 7. What software is this plug-in supposed to work with or does it only work with their DivX player?

...
Click to expand...
It tells you right there on the DivX HEVC web page. The plug-in works with DivX Player, DivX Web Player, and DivX Converter.
 
MisterMe said:
It tells you right there on the DivX HEVC web page. The plug-in works with DivX Player, DivX Web Player, and DivX Converter.
Click to expand...

Sorry, my mistake. I figured that out eventually.

I'm used to plug-ins for Photoshop and Quick Time which usually work with other programs as well. Typical of DivX that it only works with their player. Hopefully others will contribute when 4K video becomes more popular and higher compression rates are needed.
 
The latest version of VLC should playback it. If it doesn't try a nightly of the 2.2 or 3.0 branch.
 
ColdCase said:
Higher compression rates = less quality and seems to be an oxymoron when also discussion 4k video :)
Click to expand...

Actually, H.265 video quality is supposed to be at least as good as H.264 with the advantage of smaller file sizes. Unfortunately I'm not in a position to pass judgement yet because while I did get my H.265 file to play with the VidX player, and at a quick glance it does seem to be at least as good as H.264, one would need to use the same player for both files before making a final decision.

H.265 is still a relatively new codex, so we'll have to wait and see if it becomes widely accepted and see what the video professionals think of it.
 
absolut_mac said:
Actually, H.265 video quality is supposed to be at least as good as H.264 with the advantage of smaller file sizes. Unfortunately I'm not in a position to pass judgement yet because while I did get my H.265 file to play with the VidX player, and at a quick glance it does seem to be at least as good as H.264, one would need to use the same player for both files before making a final decision.

H.265 is still a relatively new codex, so we'll have to wait and see if it becomes widely accepted and see what the video professionals think of it.
Click to expand...

If I want to see the codec differences I usually use my 60 inch plasma TV... My daughter thinks any video looks great on her iPhone :) Of course 4K video is just tech talk to her as well with most of the public, they just don't seem to care or appreciate the technology. Smarter codecs are going to need smarter processors? What do you think of open source VP9 vs H.265 which will be hampered by layers of licensing?
 
ColdCase said:
If I want to see the codec differences I usually use my 60 inch plasma TV... My daughter thinks any video looks great on her iPhone :) Of course 4K video is just tech talk to her as well with most of the public, they just don't seem to care or appreciate the technology. Smarter codecs are going to need smarter processors? What do you think of open source VP9 vs H.265 which will be hampered by layers of licensing?
Click to expand...

Sadly, most of the time the differences are so obvious that a large monitor or TV isn't necessary.

I finally did a side by side comparison of the same files that I mentioned in my other recent thread comparing HB's best quality of H.264 and H.265. Unfortunately I had to use the VidX player in order to play the latter so it's not quite apples vs apples. While contrast and colors were virtually identical, there was quite a noticeable difference in resolution. Beard stubble was sharper and more clearly defined in H.264 and even faint red veins in the eyes were sharper too and hence easier to see too.

As of now, it seems to me that H.265 while having the advantage of much smaller file sizes, still has a way to go in order to match the picture/video quality of H.264.
 
absolut_mac said:
Sadly, most of the time the differences are so obvious that a large monitor or TV isn't necessary.

I finally did a side by side comparison of the same files that I mentioned in my other recent thread comparing HB's best quality of H.264 and H.265. Unfortunately I had to use the VidX player in order to play the latter so it's not quite apples vs apples. While contrast and colors were virtually identical, there was quite a noticeable difference in resolution. Beard stubble was sharper and more clearly defined in H.264 and even faint red veins in the eyes were sharper too and hence easier to see too.

As of now, it seems to me that H.265 while having the advantage of much smaller file sizes, still has a way to go in order to match the picture/video quality of H.264.
Click to expand...

Wow so h.265 does not produce better quality than h.264? I'm slightly confused. If I did 10Mbps constant on h.264 and h.265 which would be better? Likewise if I did automatic best multipass on both of them it sounds like the h.265 might be smaller but what about quality between the two?
 
Zwhaler said:
Wow so h.265 does not produce better quality than h.264? I'm slightly confused. If I did 10Mbps constant on h.264 and h.265 which would be better? Likewise if I did automatic best multipass on both of them it sounds like the h.265 might be smaller but what about quality between the two?
Click to expand...

*Covert Ops*, a 5 minute extra included with 3 Days to Kill Blu-Ray is a 771MB MKV file at about 20MB/s.

HB’s H.264 conversion of the above at the best High Profile setting but with Constant Quality set to 18 instead of the default 20 is a 349.2MB m4v file at about 8.8MB/s.

HB’s H.265 conversion of the same MKV file at the identical settings but with H.265 codec vs H.264 is 194.1MB m4v at about 5MB/s.

On my 24” Dell HD monitor the picture/video quality of the original MKV is virtually indistinguishable to the above H.264 conversion. Even on this small monitor the differences in resolution aren’t subtle between the H.265 vs H.264 conversion i.e. slight loss of sharpness and resolution. I’m sure that the differences will be a lot more apparent on a 50” or 60” HD TV let alone on a 4K TV of the same size.

Disappointing I know, because I thought that the quality would be at least as good as H.264 but with smaller file sizes. Still, this is a relatively new codec and hopefully it will produce better results than H.264 when it achieves its full potential. Only time will tell.

As an aside, I could see virtually no difference in quality between VLC (the build recommended by northernmunky above) and the DivX player. Bravo to the guys at Handbrake for an outstanding job in improving the quality of their conversions with this software that is easy to use, reliable and stable!!
 
CQ should't be used for this kind of test. Because each encoder has got it own idea about what a CQ value is.
You should use the same average bitrate for both.
 
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For what's it's worth, I shot some 1080p and mixed in some SD for a video that ended up about 30 minutes long. Exported it from FCPX as a 62GB Prores file. Then, I ran it through HB, high profile, CQ=19, decomb=default to yield h.264 and h.265 versions of the same file:
-h.264 came out at 3.49GB vs
-h.265 version at 2.64GB,
...or about a 24.5% reduction in file size with all other settings identical.

What I couldn't do was get the h.265 version to play (got sound but no video: error message is: "VLC does not support the audio or video format "hev1"", even in the latest official version of VLC. This may be because both are 60fps.

File size savings is substantial though not quite the "about 50% savings" long touted for h.265 (though this is just one sample). Processing speed seemed to be about 1.3X slower than the h.264 render, but that's probably to be expected with what I presume to be a much more complex encoding algorithm. I'm guessing that will improve as the HB crew keep refining this new option and as those who develop the algorithm keep improving it as well.

Glad to see this show up in HB. Of course, I'm going to stand by until there's an :apple:TV able to play back h.265 before starting to work on batch conversions of all my media, just to be sure that Apple doesn't throw some wrinkle into their implementation that would require re-rendering everything. I remember proactively encoding a bunch of video with 6 channel AAC assuming a next generation :apple:TV would store surround that way and then convert it to AC-3 on the fly. Learned my lesson about assuming right there.
 
Well that kinda blows... just spent 3 and a bit days encoding a movie in H.265 specifically so I could have a smaller file size for use on my iPhone, just now finding out that iPhone 6 does't support H.265 playback, apparently only Facetime uses it for now. And on top of that there's no hardware decoding, apparently the processor brute forces it, so there's battery drain, heat etc. No point in even trying to make it play on iPhone.
 
PinkyMacGodess said:
I looked at the latest update for HandBrake, and it looked like all of the updates were for the Windows version. I must have missed something.
Click to expand...

I'm at work so I don't have the version number on my home Mac, but I got the notice when I used the program that an update was available and installed it. The latest version does an outstanding job, even better than Compressor on the files I mentioned above - and faster too :)

Link below for the Mac download from their official site...

https://handbrake.fr/downloads.php
 
absolut_mac said:
I'm at work so I don't have the version number on my home Mac, but I got the notice when I used the program that an update was available and installed it. The latest version does an outstanding job, even better than Compressor on the files I mentioned above - and faster too :)

Link below for the Mac download from their official site...

https://handbrake.fr/downloads.php
Click to expand...

I will give it a go then. Thanks! I just kept seeing 'unavailable on Mac version' and thought why bother upgrading... It's not like I use it a lot, but the quality of most of the things I've ripped has been poor. Guess I need to use it more, or *SHOCK* read the directions?
 
I just brought down a TV show file down to 33% of its original size with noticeable but very slight decrease in quality.
As I'm constantly low on disk space this is good enough for a reencode for me to use.

Does anyone know how I could get the decoder running in iTunes Perian-style or when we might expect such a decoder plugin?

I know I won't be able to sync to my iOS devices then, at least not the affected files, but it's good enough to know that eventually it'll work (logically Apple can't possibly stay on H.264 forever)
So as long as the at-home experience is covered, I'd be super content with such a solution, I'd virtually get at least twice as much storage for videos.

Glassed Silver:mac
 
Glassed Silver said:
I just brought down a TV show file down to 33% of its original size with noticeable but very slight decrease in quality.
As I'm constantly low on disk space this is good enough for a reencode for me to use.

Does anyone know how I could get the decoder running in iTunes Perian-style or when we might expect such a decoder plugin?

I know I won't be able to sync to my iOS devices then, at least not the affected files, but it's good enough to know that eventually it'll work (logically Apple can't possibly stay on H.264 forever)
So as long as the at-home experience is covered, I'd be super content with such a solution, I'd virtually get at least twice as much storage for videos.

Glassed Silver:mac
Click to expand...
Your problem is not insufficient file compression. Your problem is insufficient storage. This problem can easily be remedied with the purchase of an external drive.

Your notion about Apple's commitment to h.264 is a non sequitur. The codec that replaces h.264 will not be determined by logic but by what the engineers at Apple and other media technology firms are able to develop.
 
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MisterMe said:
Your problem is not insufficient file compression. Your problem is insufficient storage. This problem can easily be remedied with the purchase of an external drive.

Your notion about Apple's commitment to h.264 is a non sequitur. The codec that replaces h.264 will not be determined by logic but by what the engineers at Apple and other media technology firms are able to develop.
Click to expand...

Well, you can't stripe an iTunes library across multiple volumes and I'm maxing out on an already fairly large drive.

I'm in a transitional period heading to a new storage strategy, so for that period at least H.265 would help a lot's
Also, however large the disks, if the files are smaller, I'll fit more on larger drives as well, something that'd be very welcome.

Also, where's the alternative?
Will Apple deploy V9?
Highly doubt it, so it's pretty much H.265.
Is it a bulletproof bet?
Well as long as there is no word from Apple no, but it's good enough for my midterm planning.

Glassed Silver:ios
 
absolut_mac said:
As an aside, I could see virtually no difference in quality between VLC (the build recommended by northernmunky above) and the DivX player. Bravo to the guys at Handbrake for an outstanding job in improving the quality of their conversions with this software that is easy to use, reliable and stable!!
Click to expand...

Have you tried MPV? So far it's the most efficient h.265 / HEVC decoder for OSX that I've found so far, significantly more efficient than VLC.

Builds are available here, and you can get a direct download for OSX here.

Honestly I'm still having difficulty seeing any loss of quality by videos encoded in h.265 by Handbrake. Has anyone done a quantitative analysis on quality loss under HEVC?

To me the main problem is decoding. HEVC decoding uses a massive amount of computing power, although that might be because I'm using it to encode / decode 4k content (Gotta love the retina iMac...)
 
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