h.265 re-encodes

[hat]

Lately I've been messing around with re-encoding some things to h.265. Beyond wanting a 5960x, there are a few things roadblocking me a bit. One is that I would like to have a tell-all tool to look at the source files before I convert them. I want to see what video codec was used, what the bitrate was, and what audio codec was used and what that bitrate was, mostly. I don't want to re-encode something to h.265, only to have the improved efficiency botched by upconverting the audio from 128kbps to 160kbps, for example.

Also, the tool I'm using is Handbrake. I've been doing some messing around here and there, but if anyone has some tips or some general guidelines to follow, I'd be grateful to have something to go on rather than kinda shooting in the dark. My aim here is to improve the filesize efficiency of older videos, even ones encoded with h.264, without sacrificing quality by taking advantage of h.265's better compression.

 

[Peter1986C]

VLC player shows it.

 

[hat]

I see the codecs used in VLC, and it shows me the total bitrate (I think) of both audio and video being played at that moment. I'd really like to have separate info for audio and video bitrate. If the audio is only 96k for example I'm not encoding at 160k...

 

[okidna]

Something like this? : https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo

 

[hat]

That looks like it'll tell me everything... but who ran it on windows 95? lol

 

[okidna]

That looks like it'll tell me everything... but who ran it on windows 95? lol

Haha that's my PC. That's Windows 7 with Aero off & classic skin enabled

 

[hat]

grrr it's still not telling me the audio bitrate... but it does on yours... why?

Doing some testing on the second system. I can't stand to encode on my main machine for long but my second machine I couldn't care if it encodes forever... just so long as the things I'm encoding don't take eons to output.

 

[okidna]

grrr it's still not telling me the audio bitrate... but it does on yours... why?

Oh my apologies, I just realised that's a H264 file. It does not telling me the audio or video bitrate when opening H265 files :

Spoiler: h265

 

[hat]

The source file I'm looking at is h264, though.

 

[okidna]

Have you tried changing the View mode to Tree or Text?

View > Tree or View > Text.

 

[hat]

Yeah, the Bit Rate field simply isn't there. In any case I've decided to experiment with HE-AAC. It only goes up to 128k, but apparently it's supposed to be like the h.265 of audio. It'll yield smaller sizes than 160k bitrate of... whatever I was using before. lol

 

[kn00tcn]

MPC(-HC?) also gives you media info

if you know the length & filesize, you know the bitrate, it's simple math

i also dont understand why you need to touch the audio, just transcode the video & remux?

EDIT: i wouldnt want to transcode since the quality is dropping, i would rather get the source out again & make a fresh encode... or acquire source material at very high bitrate)

 

[hat]

Right now I'm meddling around trying to convert h264 to h265 to get smaller filesizes. I keep reading I should be able to get about half the size of the h264 file without sacrificing quality. So far though every time I re-encode my filesize ends up larger than the h264 source. There's the RF slider in Handbrake that's about the only thing I can change, and currently it's on 28. I read that h265 RF28 should be about equivalent to h264 RF23 in quality, but at half the size. Still, my output is bigger than the input, but I don't know exactly how it was encoded.

I could always encode based on bitrate (half the origional) but I don't know if I want to do that because encoding that way an cause quality concerns during high action scenes etc... unless it might not with handbrake's "avg bitrate"...

 

[Peter1986C]

Audio is a big part in file size, try to re-encode that as well, into let's say <225 kb/s. Handbrake should tell you what it is currently on.

 

[Nabarun]

Download K-Lite Codec Pack Mega
Install
Then right-click on any media file and select MediaInfo.