Handmade Hero»Forums»Code
nj
26 posts
HEVCizing Handmade Hero
Edited by nj on
Hello Handmade people :)
I've been thinking for some time about re-encoding the series in h265 (High Efficiency Video Coding). I did some experiments and I think I got into a satisfying result - taking mmozeizko better-quality video, I've got to about 3.2 times smaller video files, and applied some sharpening to make the text more clear and readable.

Here is an example:
Before
After

The problem is, with the current amount of episodes I can do about 3 to 4 episode a day, which will take me about 3 years to finish my quest.
I know that you gamers are out there with much better rigs than my 8-years old i7-2600k, and as I know our community I think at least some of you agree to help. I've set a Resilio sync folder (I'd be glad if you'll share after use, my bandwidth is not great), but before I'll give you write permission I'd want to orchestrate the thing better, so if you want to join my efforts please talk to me either on IRC (FlyingSolomon\SlyingFolomon) or mail me ([email protected]) and I'll update the google spreadsheet I opened to manage it.

Thanks in advance, awesome community! :)

p.s. this is the bash script I'm using:
1
ffmpeg -i %1 -c:v libx265 -crf 30 -preset slower -c:a copy "%~n1 (HEVC).mp4"


Edit: There will be not sharpening/filtering whatsoever.
Matt Mascarenhas
135 posts / 1 project
Annotator, supper gatherer and slammer of thunderous high fives
HEVCizing Handmade Hero
Cool, nice work getting this going! I'm kind of tickled by the idea that your computer encodes these videos at about the same rate of videos per day as I can now annotate them (for the early 1½ hour videos, at least)...
Jeroen van Rijn
248 posts
A big ball of Wibbly-Wobbly, Timey-Wimey _stuff_
HEVCizing Handmade Hero
Cool. I'm in. I'm downloading the Resilio Sync archive now. Despite the 400Mbit downstream this may take a while. Encoding should go relatively quickly on this rig I built recently (8c/16t Ryzen). Once I have a baseline for how long it takes to recode an episode, I'll let you know and ask to reserve a block of episodes.

This is similar to how Archive Team rescued Google Video content when that shut down and Google decided not to reupload it to YT, only that didn't involve recoding so much. Just a bunch of us downloading a bunch of stuff and then rsyncing it to Jason Scott. :)
nj
26 posts
HEVCizing Handmade Hero
Update:
After some feedback from the community we decided to leave the poor video without filtering.

Thanks for your help!
Mārtiņš Možeiko
2559 posts / 2 projects
HEVCizing Handmade Hero
Edited by Mārtiņš Možeiko on
For a comparison, here's an H264 encoded day 35 with high quality settings - veryslow preset, high profile, 4.1 bitstream level.

https://martins.ninja/temp/handmade_hero_day_035_x264.mp4

It has approx. same bitrate as HEVC one in rslsync share: H264 file - 358MB. H265 file - 366MB.

Still pretty watchable and good quality. And better compatibility with player/hardware, and it encodes with ~2x speed on medium spec Haswell.

HEVC makes sense only for a very low bitrate videos. Really really low (at witch point quality will significantly suffer). For reasonable bitrate x264 encoder will give similar quality picture.