Wrap Up: HEVC Is Unsurpassable

From every the testing I performed for this article, it's clear that HEVC provides the Sunday-go-to-meeting quality at the smallest file size, if you're pleased with the downsides and restrictions that the arrange brings.

Of all the encodes I produced, here is the list from best to worst in terms of quality:

  • H.264 Made-to-order
  • x265 HEVC Medium/x265 HEVC Slow
  • x265 HEVC Faster
  • Nvidia HEVC CQP
  • x264 H.264 Very Speedy
  • x265 HEVC Ultrafast
  • Nvidia HEVC VBR Low Bitrate

With Medium HEVC encodes occupying the to the lowest degree space of everything I encoded, it clearly takes the crown for the ultimate encoding visibility that you should Be using above all other. This includes H.264, because even though I achieved better quality from a custom H.264 preset, the files were more than doubly as large.

If you're little concerned about quad and Thomas More afraid about efficiency, I would powerfully recommend exploitation Nvidia's HEVC encoder connected the default CQP settings. Information technology produces files that are around doubly Eastern Samoa bombastic as the Metier x265 planned, but it encodes these files significantly faster than anything other. Prize is much better than x265's Ultrafast settings, and slightly better than the default x264/H.264 settings in Handbrake, albeit at higher bitrates than both.

If you put on't have a relatively new Nvidia GPU and you'ray non corking on lengthy encodes, I'd commend sticking to either HEVC's Ultrafast preset or the default x264 Very Swollen preset. Ultrafast HEVC is a bit to a higher degree twice As slow as x264 Identical High, but it produces smaller files at only a young reduction in quality.

Of course, my recommendation to use the x265 Medium predetermined in Handbrake at constant quality of QF23 is alone a suggestion, and you might find out better results with your media by experimenting with the settings available to you. As I mentioned earlier, adjusting the constant quality slider is your best bet for increasing/decreasing the quality at the expense of bitrate, and adjustments may be needed for some files. It's in particular worth experimenting if you are encoding animated TV shows, such as Kinfolk Guy.

There are still questions over whether encoding to HEVC at an intensive x265 preset the like Medium is a better choice than only buying many hard drives to stock larger files. 3TB hard drives are currently just $90, piece power costs are 12 cents per kWh in the United States on the average. Depending on the performance of your rigging, its ability consumption, and the quality you want to reach, it may be better to only bargain more hard drives.

Having a library of HEVC files may also not be desirable for your use cases. The format is new enough that it's not compatible with a variety of popular media player hardware, although this will improve with each new hardware propagation. It's much hardware intensive to decode as well, which affects battery life on mobile devices, while experienced ironware may not be powerful plenty to decode it in the least.

And finally, if you're an impatient person, the overtime information technology takes to encode to HEVC versus even a stinky-select H.264 file may go frustrating.

But if you genuinely want the best quality files in the smallest possible data formatting, HEVC is the way to go. For this very reason, it's atomic number 102 surprisal to see the industry ambitious for widespread HEVC adoption, or adoption of a similar low-bitrate, high-quality format.

Flowing away from H.264 to HEVC or an equivalent is especially important for 4K streaming, atomic number 3 the bandwidth requirements send away be low significantly by plainly encryption the media in a many compressed data formatting. HEVC is perfect for this: it provides the same quality as H.264 streams at fractional the bitrate.

Clearly wide HEVC borrowing hasn't come to fruition yet, however testing what the data format is resourceful of has taught me at least one thing: the impendent end of H.264 has been flagged, and it's time to prepare for a new generation of better, more efficient encoding formats.