Nearing the filling of my 14.5TB hard drive and wanting to wait a bit longer before shelling out for a 60TB raid array, I’ve been trying to replace as many x264 releases in my collection with x265 releases of equivalent quality. While popular movies are usually available in x265, less popular ones and TV shows usually have fewer x265 options available, with low quality MeGusta encodes often being the only x265 option.
While x265 playback is more demanding than x264 playback, its compatibility is much closer to x264 than the new x266 codec. Is there a reason many release groups still opt for x264 over x265?
By a factor of 2 with the same bitrate. But you only need half the bitrate for the same quality (SNR) so it really isn’t.
However, encoding is about 10x more demanding in terms of bitrate, or 5x for the same quality. This may be worth it for long-term storage or wide distribution over limited bandwidth (torrenting), but not for one-time personal use.
For a Jellyfin server however it’s quite a boon.
Did you do something specific to play x265 on JellyFin? Last time I tried, the video kept crashing every 5-8minutes, even with a low bitrate threshold.
Which client? Works fine here
JellyFin App for Android TV (on a Shield)
There is an option to use an external player. So you could use VLC as an external player and use it. It would work better.
I tried that, but the result is the same (and progress doesn’t seem to be saved). Maybe it’s specific to the Shield or to my files
Hmmm what do you mean the video kept crashing? Where is your server set up? What are you using for OS? Is it bare metal, is it running in a Windows, in a VM, in a container?
In my case it’s running in a Proxmox LXC container (the container is running Ubuntu). I’m passing through the integrated GPU, as instructed in the Jellyfin docs. And then I enable Intel QSV transcoding on Jellyfin. The CPU consumption is close to negligible. Then again, you need an Intel CPU capable of x264 transcoding at decent rates. Anything after 8th gen should be able to do the trick (with this I mean, you can ALSO transcode whatever source to x265 on the fly, but that’s not a feature I’m actively using at the moment, as the resulting file is usually larger anyway). I’m using an i5 9500T, and I benchmarked something like 8 transcodes simultaneously to almost no impact. I think it was starting to be noticeable past 12 transcodes simultaneously. But that’s some heavy streaming there! That’d mean EVERYONE is connecting at once to your server using FF (I believe Chrome is x265 capable, and the apps also take x265 just fine if your phone/computer support it). So…in short, my i5 from a few generations ago is already overkill for x265
Only if you’re disk limited or bandwidth limited. And in many cases will lead to transcoding the content, which could be a problem if you’re CPU limited or have no GPU for hardware transcoding.
Everything (not literally… but figuratively) can do x264. Not everything can do x265…
If your Jellyfin collection starts to grow big enough, and x264 transcoding on the fly is as easy as passing through the GPU these days…it’s pretty much a no brainer. You have small files, and if someone still needs x264 (which would need to be specifically a Firefox streamer, as I believe Chrome supports it, and the Jellyfin apps also support it if your computer/phone does), the transcoding on the fly can be done using about 1-2% of the server CPU. I did something like 12 simultaneous different transcodes once, and my oldish i5 9500T held its ground perfectly, I think it reached about 35% CPU at the peak of it.
9500T has quicksync. That’s why you’re transcodes were only 1-2% on the cpu. You were doing transcoding on the built in gpu.
It is NOT trivial to do transcode without hardware decoding. How much utilization was on your 630 iGPU in that scenario?
Well it’s a Jellyfin server. I bought a CPU that CAN transcode, for this specific purpose. Without hardware decoding, CPU usage scales quite quickly, but it could still hold 3-4 streams at 60fps I believe. At any rate, I bought this 2nd hand microPC with the specific purpose of being a Proxmox server with Jellyfin transcoding. And so, between having to consider further hard drive upgrades, or using the transcode function…I kinda choose the cheapest one since it’s at hand.
Congrats? I’m running my Plex server on enterprise hardware. There’s no onboard gpu for decoding because that’s not the purpose of that hardware. I do have a graphics card in there to do transcodes, and intimately monitor that usage. My original statement still holds. “which could be a problem if you’re CPU limited or have no GPU for hardware transcoding.”
Transcoding may not be that accessible/useful for some people. I’d rather waste some drive space than do transcodes for every user, but that’s because I have 400TB(not a typo) of space but don’t have enough space to put in any card that takes up more than 1pci slot. In my mind throwing another 20TB drive into my configuration is easier and cheaper than transcoding. In a couple of years we’re going to be having this discussion for AV1 anyway.
Edit: Oh, and 3-4 streams at 60fps, isn’t enough description… really doesn’t cover the most taxing part of the transcode process, which is resolution. 3-4 1080p streams is much easier than even 1-2 4k streams. Considering that content is trending towards higher resolutions rather than higher framerates, I’m not sure what you’re getting at. My T600 can do 3-4 4k streams before it starts running into problems. That should be something like 15-16 1080p streams. Considering my library, I’d still rather have the drives in a more accessible format that will direct play on more devices than transcode my 60-100mbps 4k videos. Keep the transcoding for those that really need it rather than making it the default answer.