Backing up Blu Rays x264 vs x265

[MG42Maniac]

Hi Guys,

I've currently got about 200 Blu Rays that are currently sat in a cupboard under the stairs. I use Plex for my media consumption now so ideally I want to back these up for Plex and shove the discs in the loft.

My idea was to just use MakeMkV to strip out everything bar Video, highest quality English audio and subs. I was hoping this would get the file size down quite a bit, ~30GB per film, maybe.

Then I was thinking, is it worth re-encoding in x265? The quality of the movie is paramount. I don't want to be watching a film in lesser quality when I have the original in the loft, I can't live my life like that . I would want the x265 version to be indistinguishable from the original. Not bothered about clients not supporting x265, the Plex Server has plenty of grunt to transcode anything.

Because I'm backing up so many movies I am thinking that a 15%(feasible?) size reduction saved per movie if I used x265 would total up to a hell of a lot of free GB but then would presumably take an absolute age to re encode?

Also, I've read that x265 is great for streaming as it's prettier at lower bit rates but for backups x264 is still king.

Thoughts?

P.S. Sorry if this posts breaks the rules, did a quick search and saw a number of threads on backing up Blu Rays so assumed it is okay.

 

[lurkio]

It will take a lot of time to encode if you want quality

I have been experimenting this encoding show tv series to x265 , did a bunch of encodes on the same file to compare quality vs size

results are better with x265 but it takes time

 

[MG42Maniac]

Thanks for feedback! How long roughly was it taking for the encoding and what was the spec of the PC? Also, how much space did you save?

 

[joeyjojo]

Thanks for feedback! How long roughly was it taking for the encoding and what was the spec of the PC? Also, how much space did you save?

The only way to get a reliable answer to this is to try it yourself. Depends on the film, settings, and your machine (CPU, memory, and I/O).

Using x264 you should start by finding an acceptable CQ setting (20-23 is typical) with "normal" tuning. Then, find the slowest tuning that finishes in an acceptable time. After that you will have a good idea about compression %.

I've hardly used x265 but it will be a similar process probably. x265 claims to be 26% smaller than x264 for the same quality. Not huge but if you've got the HW acceleration for it then why not. Note though it's still in development, I wouldn't use it yet tbh.

 

[darael]

I downloaded a 29 minutes program from Iplayer and encoded it using H.264 and H.265 in Handbrake. I used the Faster preset and a CQ of 23 for both codecs and no noise filtering was performed.

Original file size was 892.9 MB.

H.264 file size was 272.7 MB and took 00:14:24 to encode.

H.265 file size was 143.6 MB and took 00:19:45 to encode.

I did notice that the H.264 was slightly softer than the original, but you'd really have to stare at a still to notice.

H.265 was a little more softer than H.264, but when playing I couldn't really see much difference.