Quote:
Originally Posted by Boulder
The difference between x264 and x265 is that the former creates blocking and the latter blurs when it's bitrate-starved and usually blocking doesn't seem as distracting. The QPs look quite high so the encode definitely is lacking bits. The encoding process is definitely very slow, so probably you're better off with x264 anyway.
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That may be the case, but to my eyes some of the hardware-encoded (Intel) look better than software-encoded. This shouldn't be the case. Even with x264, it is possible to produce a visually appealing grainy encode with a relatively low bitrate (e.g. 3500kbps @ 720p). Is it perfect? No. But that's not the point.
x265 is meant to bring improvements in size:compression/efficiency, amongst other features, and it's mature enough by now that grain retention should match that of x264's. x265 seems good for content with very, very light grain and content without grain. This is the most bizarre part to me. Even the --grain preset produces poor results.
Again, the entire point of doing a 2-pass encode at 5mbps is to compare different codecs and encoding methods at the same bitrate using the same source. If the newest one loses to hardware encoding and its predecessor, that shows a problem. I do use crf for encoding the vast majority of content for storage, but that's not the point of this test.