What’s up with this? I tried H.265 this morning and my GeForce 730 didn’t have the proper chip for encoding H.265 so MCEBuddy used only software encoding, which was fine as a test. The result was it took 2 hours and 40 minutes to encode but it resulted in a file 3.5 times smaller than the same recording encoded in H.264…769K instead of 2707K. I was amazed and the video quality of the H.265 was spectacular at such a small file size.
So, after dinner tonight I went to MicroCenter and bought a new GTX 1650 Super, installed it, and tried to encode a different file using MCEBuddy and the MKV H.265 profile and then with the MKV Normal Quality profile I’ve benn using for a year as comparison.
Both encodings took about the same time, but the H.265 file was 500K larger than the H.264 file.
What is going on here? I’m very frustrated that after spending $180 on a video card I wasn’t looking to buy is now producing inferior results to software encoding. I even looked in the log file to make sure it was using the proper codec etc. and I verified the coded in MediaInfo.
I really need some advice. I am running out of hard drive space and going over to H.265 and re-encoding all my archived TS files will save me ton of space…but only after it starts working correctly.
Can you attach the log file for each encoding runs? I’d be interesting to see how it encoded. I have had this happen and it can take some tweaking to get the best results for your setup.
Thanks! I’ll look it over and see if anything stands out. Do you have the software encoding H.265 log also?
I do know that you will get different results between software and hardware encoding. NVidia to me is specifically strange when it comes to the encoder used in Handbrake. The encoder preset in the MCEBuddy profile for the handbrake parameters uses values available to the software encoder. This varies when NVidia and even Intel hardware encoding is used.
Here are the encoder presets for software:
ultrafast
superfast
veryfast
faster
fast
medium
slow
slower
veryslow
placebo
And these are the available presets for NVidia:
hq
hp
fast
medium
slow
default
The profile uses medium. But the medium used by software might be very different then the medium used by NVidia.
I personally use the hq preset for NVidia (short for High Quality). But this still produces larger results then when processed on my Intel box that is using a encoder preset of quality. (Intel only has 3 presets available).
My only recommendation would be to play around with different profile settings. I personally use a custom profile file and only encode in HVEC. Below is the profile I use for NVidia.
[HEVC MKV NVidia]
Description=HEVC in MKV hardset to use NVidia.
order=handbrake
DisableEncoderReordering=true
handbrake-general=--decomb --auto-anamorphic --verbose=2
handbrake-video=--start-at duration:0 -e nvenc_h265 --encoder-preset hq -q 26
handbrake-audio=--aencoder copy --audio-copy-mask aac,ac3,eac3,truehd,dts,dtshd,mp3,flac -R auto
handbrake-audioac3=--aencoder copy --audio-copy-mask aac,ac3,eac3,truehd,dts,dtshd,mp3,flac -R auto
handbrake-ext=.mkv
handbrake-audiodelay=skip
handbrake-UsingHardwareEncoding=true
handbrake-DisableSoftwareEncoderFallback=true
AllowAllCopyRemuxing=true
Thank you for all that effort…but I have one problem. Handbrake in MCEBuddy takes over my computer and results in 100% CPU utilization and causes lots of problems with other programs that are running and my computer is basically unusable…so I edited the profiles to use ffmpeg which results in similar results in time and quality but keeps my CPU utilzation around 50% or below.