Encoding Standards

[JJohnson]

I would like to make a formal request of the staff.  Please switch the encoding to x265 HEVC.  I see your 1080p files for simple 7-15 minute videos all over 1GB in size which is in 2022 quite eye-dropping.  A 7-15 minute file in 1080p should not be much over 500 MB at best using x265, and a full movie can definitely be under 1.5 GB, rather than the 8GB I've seen one or two movies having.

So, please switch over to x265 HEVC codec and re-encode your existing and future files into this format.  It will save us our hard drive space, and save you as well.

[MrTorso]

It is pretty easy to re-enocde them to x265 if that is what you prefer. 

A lot of people drop them onto flash drives and watch on their TVs.  How many older TVs support x265 HVEC? 

I have two older Roku ultras and they don't support it.. Most people aren't going to upgrade just for a RiffTrax.  They gotta go with the masses!

[ihavemyreasons]

Last media player I had was supposed to support x265 HVEC but in practice it didn't always work. Replaced that media player with a HTPC - not for x265 support - but PCs are about the only thing I've found that play x265 encodes well.

And not Rifftrax but I always found the Cinatic Titanic and MST3K revival digital files to be encoded wonky and have had to do a quick reencode to get them to play correctly. Point being reencoding is kind of a pain but not difficult.

[LucasM]

I am all for leaving the encoding as it is.  I also use flash drives or hard drives for my RiffTrax.  x265 will not play in ANY of my three Blu-ray players, so I'd have to re-encode EVERY x265 video - and that would mean I'd just say, "fuck it," and not buy them in the first place.  It is WAY too large a hassle to re-encode everything I download, not to mention that re-encoded h264 vids from x265 originals tend to have a jumpiness to the video almost like every few frames one is dropped (though I know that is not the case).  [That last may be my re-encoding program.  But I'm not buying yet another program to re-encode just x265 vids - I just won't buy any x265s.]

So, yeah, my vote is with Mr. Torso: to keep the vid encoding just as it is.

[borg48]

I was thinking of doing an AI upscale on some of my shorts. When I do that I usually re-encode the video with x.265 to save on space since the files are much larger. However, in the last few weeks I've been testing the AV1 codec.

I just ran a few tests on my Animal Antics short. It is 175mb and 9 minutes long. It took 3 minutes to encode with x.265 and came out to 90mb. It took 12 minutes to encode with AV1 and came out to 69MB.

x.265 was much faster and gave a 48% decrease in size. AV1 was slower, but had a 60% decrease in size.

The problem is AV1 deletes basically all the film grain, and that can leave the picture looking blurry compared to the original. I have read it's pretty easy to add it back in, but I'm new to ffmpeg and haven't looked that up yet.

I've read most companies don't want to use x.265 because they have to pay for a license on the codec. AV1 is open source so I expect it to be compatible with more products in the future than x.265. So I wouldn't recommend they encode everything into x.265, but in the next year or so AV1 might be a good option. We'll just have to see how it develops.

Edit: Just for more information I took an older 720p video that is 25 minutes long and upscaled it to 1080p for a friend, doubled the frame rate to 60 FPS, and converted it to AV1.

The original file was 720 MB, the upscaled version was 1.17 GB, and the double frame rate version was 490 MB.  The compression I used on that was too high and the video lost some detail, but it still looked really good considering it had twice as many frames and was 58% smaller. I'm gonna try it again with a lower compression setting and see how small I can get it and keep more of the detail. It takes 10-12 hours for my computer to double the frame rate and encode the 25 minute video so testing takes a while.