Captain's Log Supplemental

One of the side effects of the RAID-mode oops incident has been having to re-rip and encode my Blu-rays and DVDs. At this point, most of the anime collection is basically done, but movies are in the “As needed” case because of the time/effort.

Recently, I was in the mood both, for watching Pacific Rim and taking a look at one of my original reference videos from back when I setup my previous AVC/x264 presets in HandBrake. I.e., Prometheus. In the years since then, I shifted over to an HEVC/x265 and slowly started to adopt it. Most discs since then have been anime or few and far in-between, so not as large a sample set.

So, naturally, this was the preset I chose when ripping Pacific Rim. However, I found myself disappointed in the video quality. Fortunately, I still enjoyed it greatly–as one of my favorite films and one that I haven’t seriously watched in a few years.

In particular, the opening sequence and numerous cases of darker scenes exhibited artifacts. Now, my original AVC preset wasn’t perfect but it wasn’t that bad either. Taking the first chapter, I decided to do a bunch of experiments, focused on the parts most prone to artifacts. The logo’s background fire effect, the star field, and the breach, followed by the more general video quality of the next 5~6 minutes of the opening.

Encoder	Quality	Size (MB)	Bitrate (Mbit/s)	Time	Comments
Blu-ray	N/A	38,320	22.8	N/A	Reference Blu-ray ripped with MKV.
x264	RF 20	1,010	14.8	06:05	Reference AVC. Limited artifacts
x265	RF 18	949.1	13.8	13:11	Like reference AVC
	RF 20	794	11.5	11:39	Close to AVC reference. Not as good as RF 18.
	RF 22	688.1	9.8	06:56	Reference HEVC Too many artifacts.
Video Toolbox	CQ 80	1,780	25.7	01:08	Close to AVC reference. (not as good)
	CQ 70	1,080	15.7	01:08	Close to AVC reference. (not as good)
	CQ 22	448.9	6.5	01:07	Like a mid 2000s video game (only better)
	CQ 18	453.2	6.3	01:07	Like a mid 2000s video game (really)
	CQ 10	424	6.1	01:07	Like a mid 2000s video game (too close for comfort)

The AVC and HEVC reference referred to above, are my presets. For x264, high profile level 4.1 was used with the “medium” preset. For x265 auto was used for both profile/level, with the “fast” preset. The only adjustment for the experiments were the Constant Quality, which for those encoders is a logarithmic scale where higher numbers are worse quality.

For Video Toolbox, I couldn’t find any documentation about the scale but the tests obviously show higher numbers are higher quality. In each case, the “medium” preset was used.

Based on what I found, I’m kind of disappointed with the x265 cases. Perhaps it’s time to experiment with kicking it to the medium preset or enabling a deblocking filter to compensate. For the most part though, the quality is there sufficiently if comparable bitrates are thrown at it. The downside of course is that basically doubles the encoding time from x264.

The Video Toolbox case is more impressive, but also not so useful. I believe the M2’s encoder is a lot better than the ‘Bridge and early ‘Lake era Intel encoders. But in much the same way, they just don’t serve my purposes. To make my M2 achieve good enough quality for streaming, the file sizes balloon to near the original Blu-ray–so may as well not bother transcoding in that case. But still, we’re talking about a speed of 190~200 fps encoding versus about 30-40 fps encoding. I think it’s better suited for video editing than streaming video from my server to my TV.

The difference though is considerable. At the uber quality levels, it’s still subpar for Netflix/YouTube quality at this point, versus a Blu-ray reference.

Partly though, I’m tempted to revert back to using x264 and partly tempted to just leave it at Blu-ray. I didn’t really change from AVC to HEVC to save on disk space, so much as I did it because the more modern codec was now widely available on most of my hardware. The kind of perspective that AVC is still fine, but I assume devices will hold onto HEVC support longer once AVC becomes to new MPEG-2 :D.

There’s also the option to just stick with MakeMKVs output. My entire Blu-ray collection probably represents about 4 TB to 5 TB of data at this point, and ahem, it’s an 8 TB storage array with 6 TB free. My storage concerns were pretty much solved two sets of hard drives ago, back when my server’s storage was made up of 3 TB drives rather than 8s. The playback concerns, well, much like HEVC capable devices becoming the norm, most of my devices have less concern with Blu-ray quality bitrates at this point.