[benwaggoner]

I'd take out everything from the ffmpeg processing that you don't need. For example, x265 and ffmpeg don't (or didn't; maybe ffmpeg added support at some point) process anything different with different chromaloc, so letting the metadata be the default is the safest.

What's your use case, and what are you trying to be compatible with? Normally I'd set --level-idc, --vbv-maxrate, and --vbv-bufsize to match the spec. And I'd use at least --preset slower for content I'm trying to get good quality at a constrained bitrate with.

You can probably do it all in ffmpeg with the params like you had set up. I just don't do it that way and don't have any experience to share. I've often used particular x265 builds and like not having to update ffmpeg all the time.