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?
Some notes: Don't use GPU to reencode you will lose quality.
Don't worry for long encoding times, specially if the objective is long term storage.
Power consumption might be significant. I run mine what the sun shine and my photovoltaic picks up the tab.
And go AV1, open source and seems pretty committed to by the big players. Much more than h265.
In order to encode to a specific format without unintentionally losing quality, doesn't the initial file have to be a remux?
Indeed, but YMMV and to me quality is still good if source was not a remix but a top quality encoding
Yep, gpu de- and encoding is high-speed but often lower quality and with old codec versions. Common mistake to think that gpu = better.