A quick x264 vs x265 comparison when encoding the same video file

[ETAdmin]

I spent a very brief amount of time testing this - So far only two titles: World of Warcraft: Legion alpha and Black Desert Online

I set Fraps to RGB Lossless recording and had Fraps split files every 4GB

The first test was World of Warcraft: Legion, and the clip stats are as follows:

File size                   : 3.91 GiB
Duration                    : 33s 567ms
Bit rate                    : 999 Mbps
Width                       : 1 920 pixels
Height                      : 1 200 pixels
Frame rate                  : 30.000 fps
Bits/(Pixel*Frame)          : 14.453

I ran it through StaxRip using the default settings for x264. The resulting file was as follows:

File size              : 85.0 MiB
Duration                  : 33s 567ms
Bit rate                  : 21.2 Mbps
Maximum bit rate          : 28.5 Mbps
Bits/(Pixel*Frame)        : 0.307

The x264 encode time was 57 Seconds.

Next, I simply switched StaxRip to use x265 for encoding - I still kept the defaults (Both quality settings for x264 and x265 are CRF22.)

File size            : 67.4 MiB
Duration             : 33s 567ms
Bit rate             : 16.8 Mbps
Maximum bit rate     : 26.5 Mbps
Bits/(Pixel*Frame)   : 0.244

The x265 encode time was 1 Minute 52 Seconds

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I'm not going to post the full stats of the Black Desert videos, but as a summary:

World of Warcraft: Legion | 30fps, 1920x1200 resolution, 33 second video

• Fraps: 4GB
• x264: 84.9MB
• x265: 67.3MB

Black Desert Online | 30fps, 1920x1080 resolution, 58 second video

• Fraps: 4GB
• x264: 114MB
• x265 75.5MB

I tried playing the videos side by side - I had a very hard time discerning a quality difference between the two videos but from what I saw it seems that the x265 encoded video has a slightly "warmer" color to it. Regardless of what is actually "better" - the fact that the filesize is much lower for what essentially looks the same is outstanding.

Downside is that you don't get Windows Explorer thumbnails for the x265 encoded files, and only VLC will play them.