So I’m going through my movie and music collection and ripping it to my NAS just to save physical space. I’m ripping my music with FLAC and handbrake for video media. H.264 for DVD content and HEVC for HD content. Does Intel quick sync help much for saving time and producing a smaller file with the same level of quality as the original file? I’ve tried using my gpu and found the file sizes and quality not up to par with Encoding using my CPU. I have an Intel 7700k and 1070 GTX.
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CPU x264 or x265 is always going to be superior to Quick Sync or NVENC.
For future proofing, encode everything to VP9 and Opus instead in MKV. VP9 and Opus are both open standards, and the compression ratio for VP9 is almost as good as HEVC.
I’d recommend the SVT-VP9 encoder as it can handle massive parallelism with massive multithreading.
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You are leaving me confused here, MKV is a container, yet you seem to be treating it interchangeably as a container or a compression style… What.
Derp, I misread that.
Anyways, on topic, I would suggest you test with a sample file and play them side by side to compare.
I would just stick with using CPU to encode x265 asit seems to usually be more reliable than having GPU assisted encoding.
The only other container that supports VP9 is WebM, which is a fork of MKV anyways. If you wanted to keep Dolby or DTS audio, MKV is still the way to go container-wise.
I’m keeping Dolby and DTS audio. The current set up is Rip with MakeMKV > Re-encode with handbrake > Rename files > Place on NAS > Play with Kodi on my Shield TV in the living room.
I am currently ripping and encoding my entire library. I had started hevc but it was ridiculously slow, 25fps in handbrake vs h264 @ 50ish fps. I get just about the same quality (if not the same) and slightly larger files with h264 vs h265. Now I have always done CPU encodes. Compression is always going to be better with cpu vs NVENC or Quick Sync. It will take longer, infact I attempted NVENC with h265 and it was in the 300fps range, but huge file. i.e. An episode with cpu encode of h265 takes about 45 to 50 minutes per episode of a 45minute run time. The NVENC took like 12minutes, but resulted in a much larger file size. So GPU encoding is not really beneficial if you are trying to make the best use of drive space.
On another note, NVENC or Quicksync is better used for live streaming to youtube or twitch, because their servers can handle the bandwidth.
How was x265 (CPU) Slow vs x265 (GPU) Slow in regards to visual quality compared to original source. I noticed a few files I tested with NVENC somewhat sluggish to load on my Shield TV through Kodi and the quality seemed off on a few other files with artifacting.
I only attempted to open the file I encoded with NVENC on my desktop with VLC, so I can’t say to how it would work with KODI. But, the encode was like 6gb (with NVENC) vs 1gb (with cpu encode of h265). But it wasn’t better quality either. In fact the source file I encoded was 8gb in size (a single tv show episode). So I think h265 or h264 with cpu is the best bet for opening faster anyways. Because they are smaller sizes.
For instance, encoding with HVENC outputs a larger file, which would take more memory, more cpu utilization and network bandwidth to deal with. The thing that just crossed my mind is that a NAS is generally less powerful than a PC. So it might be slower in general to play off of. If you have a desktop like I do as a NAS, it benefits from having a better cpu and more ram for running/transcoding to KODI or in my case Plex.