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?
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RARBG was so good for this, their releases were of such good consistent quality
If you search for ORARBG on therarbg site you can still find some OG releases and not random YIFY crap
I just use qbitorrent and the search feature
Didn’t even know that was a thing ngl and I use qbit nox on my server. Kinda obsoletes the *arr suite
Eh, the *arr apps are more about the freedom to be hands-off. Ideally you will just request something in a frontend like Overseerr from your phone and it will handle the rest. Or automatically grab upon release.
I only found out shortly after the closure of RARBG. Found this is the best way to find old RARBG torrents, just search for whatever then filter for RARBG or 265
Not if you have lots of specific filters set up in the *Arr suite. So much better getting a HQ rip automatically than choosing a random one in qbit.
MeGusta and Im pretty sure all other x265 groups aren’t really considered official scene releases and usually the sources are the larger x264 scene releases. I’ve found that you can get the same if not better results as MeGusta encoding with a simple -cq 27 with the nvenc_h265 encoder which is reasonably fast.
A good portion of the world thats pirating media is playing it cheap junk with 10+ year old CPUs that can’t handle x265, most do not have terabytes of media they just watch and delete so overall size isnt a huge issue, most likely when a new codec does become more mainstream, it won’t actually mean smaller releases anyway, it will just mean better quality ones.
In the 00’s the standard everyone used was 800mb DivX because thats the size CD-Rs came in, over time, going into the 2010s we got x264 releases but the targets were around 4-8gb usually and by that point the size of optical media didn’t really matter since flash drives are cheap and reusable and overall internet speeds for people continues to increase as well so its more likely that when the day comes, the scene will probably coalesce around something like 8-16gb per release.
That’s why I grab the Chinese versions of stuff in the original language, they seem to not care about license and encode in h265 in the app
I’d be interested to know how many of the streaming services natively offer x265. If it’s not many, then I could understand why release groups wouldn’t wanna re encode (e.g. it wouldn’t be a true WEB-DL anymore)
Prob 0 % as h265 is like HDMI and needs to be licensed to be used. Sadly this has set up 265 to be a failure outside of piracy
Every 4K WEB-DL I see uses x265. It’s extremely popular by streaming services.
Should’ve mentioned I meant 1080p. x265 or something equivalent is essential for 4k
My raspberry pi doesnt transcode h265 very well at all. Much easier to expand the storage until I can upgrade to something better
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at least on a 4, this command will misleadingly return “disabled” even though your programs are able to use hwdec, because the h.265 decoder isn’t part of the Pi 4’s GPU, it’s elsewhere.
Oh my apologies, my pi doesnt handle it well on plex. Didnt realise it at the time and sorta just went with what was easiest to set up before realising I’d need to pay to get transcoding 😔
I stick to 264 for the same reason. I’m happy running Plex from my Pi4. Multiple streams are fine to devices around the home.
Also streams fine on my phone when external.
I don’t think the 5 has any hardware for encoding
nor decoding 264 :(
a rather annoying regression from the 4 to the 5, especially when the 5 now supports more MIPI cameras where live encoding is crucial.
I only download h265 because my drive is filling up as well. I can usually play it back easily in software, except for film grain that wrecks the performance
