I'm sad they skipped out on a 4k resolution test. I'd really like to see how they compare at those resolutions or higher, since really x265 isn't really going to be ubiquitous in hardware for another couple years. At that time 4k should (hopefully) be the standard, or at the very least will be a common use case.
@dang: Can you update the second x264 to x265 in the title?<p>---<p>The only bad thing I've ever heard about x265 is that it needs beefier hardware compared to x264. Otherwise it's better in every regard. Is this true?
> x265 outperforms libvpx for almost all resolutions and quality metrics, but the performance gap narrows (or even reverses) at 1080p.<p>It's not clear if this means libvpx is sometimes better than x265 at resolutions > 1080p or <= 1080p. I think the author intended "occasionally better when <= 1080p"
I've been playing around with reencoding all my media to H.265/HEVC at home. The space savings over the older H.264 are around 50% (or better!) depending on what I encode<p>I have a lot of digitized box sets of TV shows, things like The Simpsons or King of the Hill. Most bit torrent copies of these shows weigh in at about 180MB/episode (for a 480P video)<p>Encoding them through H.265 using NVIDIA's "Nvenc" encoder (CPU encoding is paaaainfully slow) I can get them down to a mere 60MB on average, with no discernible quality difference<p>Moving up to 1080P files, I encoded some Star Trek: The Next Generation digital remasters, they shrunk from 600MB to about 350-400MB. Not quite as impressive, though I had to scale up the quality as HEVC was wrecking havoc on some of the low contrast areas (like character uniforms turning into one flat smeared looking color)
I imagine the biggest difficulty is the licensing for x265. It may have changed now but from last I knew they wanted a royalty from streaming services monetizing the use of x265.
I find it odd that Netflix is using Youtube and Periscope to do their broadcast. I get that that is where the audience is - but I'm surprised they aren't also broadcasting it using their own tech.
> x265 outperforms libvpx for almost all resolutions and quality metrics, but the performance gap narrows (or even reverses) at 1080p.<p>if you only read the TL;DR part i.e. What did we learn?
You think wow that's bad for libvpx.
Than you read:<p>> 3 resolutions (480p, 720p and 1080p)<p>And think... well not that bad. 2/3 vs 1/2 isn't bad.