264 to 265 conversion

[thatguyontheright]

I have googled it this question and what came up I think seems to be questionable software.

Without re-ripping my media and going back to raw, is there a way to take my h.264 compressed media and convert it to h.265 without losing quality? I am running win7 64bit.

I am sure I know the answer to this, but I just want to be sure.

 

[13thmonkey]

from what I've seen, no. They are not 'subsets' of each other if you like, if you use handbrake with a very high quality factor you'll not lose anything, but it will probably be larger than the original.

 

[boosted1g]

You have to re-rip.

As 13th Monkey said you should be able to use handbrake and not have much quality loss (vs ripping say uncompressed blu-ray to h265)

Now FYI h265 is MORE compressed and thus by definition it is going to have decreased quality over h264.

 

[13thmonkey]

Now FYI h265 is MORE compressed and thus by definition it is going to have decreased quality over h264.

Not true, for a given bitrate 265 is better quality than 264. To achieve the same quality as 264 a lower bitrate can be used, it's simply a more efficient compression algorithm.

 

[thatguyontheright]

Lame. I bet it depends on the content too.

 

[thatguyontheright]

I tinkered a bit with several different media types and here is what I have concluded.

Converting h.264 to h.265 is no big deal with animation. It is much harder with live action as you are adding more compression on top of the existing compression. On average, I was able to get a 30% reduction in file size with an animated feature, avoiding pixelation. Live action files were larger than before.

It would be worth it if your file is abnormally large, say 4+ gigs for a 1080p movie at 2 hours on h.264 compression.

 

[13thmonkey]

personally i'm looking at full BR rips of my BR's so 20-30GB, where there might be some benefit, But processing time vs simply buying another disk... i'd just get another disk or two. However being able to run it over wifi would be a benefit.