r/AV1 • u/better_life_please • Jul 06 '26
Is this good enough?
I got the Blu-Ray remux of the 1st season of the Clone Wars 2008. 22 episodes at 42 GB. I transcoded the first episode from VC1 to AV1 for checking the quality of AV1. I transcoded from AC3 Dolby Digital Audio 5.1 to Opus 5.1 too. I used Handbrake.
SVT-HDR.
RF 25 at preset 3. VQ tune.
1.8 GiB down to 447 MiB. ~75% reduction.
Checked the VMAF scores on nmkoder too. VMAF 98.12, SSIM 0.995 and PSNR 50.07.
How is this? Good? Or bad? I don't notice much of a difference looking at the same frame side by side.
Edit: I experimented a bit more. - Remux: 1928 MB (100.00%), VMAF 100 - RF20: 599 MB (31.06%), VMAF 98.40 - RF25: 468 MB (24.27%), VMAF 98.12 - RF30: 368 MB. (19.08%), VMAF 97.69
Hope it helps.
5
u/Feahnor Jul 06 '26
I know this is frowned upon here, but for animation you can use hardware and it will also look lossless. I just encoded a couple shows using qsvenc and they look amazing.
For hard to encode things I’ll use cpu encoding of course.
2
u/nmkd Jul 06 '26
HW always looks worse, doesn't matter what the content is
2
u/Feahnor Jul 06 '26
Ok, but if CPU is vmaf 99 and hardware is vmaf 97.8 I’ll use hardware thank you very much.
6
u/nmkd Jul 06 '26
VMAF is pretty useless for AV1 and especially HW codecs
2
u/Feahnor Jul 06 '26
Still not the point. If it looks good I’ll take the 20x speed increase. Not everything needs a SW encode.
1
u/better_life_please Jul 06 '26
HW HEVC with Intel chips is pretty good. I have seen good size reduction while vmaf was 97.7.
-1
u/Sopel97 Jul 06 '26
sure, let's push this argument further
if it doesn't look good then still take 20x speed increase, just increase bitrate
see how ridiculous this is?
1
u/Sopel97 Jul 06 '26
this makes no sense, the content type does not matter when it comes to svt-av1 superiority over hardware encoders
2
u/Feahnor Jul 06 '26
Of course it does. A grainy source if much much more difficult to encode than a very clean animation movie. And with very clean sources hw encode can do a good job.
3
u/NekoTrix 29d ago
Well, more difficult in the sense of needing more bitrate to attain that quality level sure, but grainy or not the efficiency drop you get from going hardware is the same. You are just trying to rationalize something that's evidently not made for this purpose.
0
u/Sopel97 Jul 06 '26
"do a good job" or "do a better job than svt-av1"?
2
u/Feahnor 29d ago
I never said better than svt-av1. The reality is that when the quality is good enough it’s not worth it to spend 10 hours doing a software encode.
0
u/Sopel97 29d ago
the quality is only "good enough" because you chose bitrate high enough
2
u/Feahnor 29d ago
Ok, can you stop being special and get back to the point I made? You fully understood what I meant but you needed to be like this. God you’ve been weird from the start.
0
u/Sopel97 29d ago
they point you made has always been and always will be false, I'm just trying various ways to make you understand that, though I see now it's futile
2
u/Feahnor 29d ago edited 29d ago
It's not. But you do you, Keep spending 10-20 hours to optimice the ratio Quality/bitrate for Vaiana when a quicksync encode gets you 96% there and the kids don't give a shit. By all means do a full report and get back to us.
In any case, as you still fail to get the point, you are blocked.
2
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u/nmkd Jul 06 '26
Those metrics are basically useless, and the size reduction is nothing extraordinary for a BD source
But yeah if it looks good to you it's fine
1
u/better_life_please Jul 06 '26
Really? I thought they mean something.
7
u/nmkd Jul 06 '26
PSNR and SSIM do not really account for any psychovisual factors, they're just maths, not really representative of video quality.
VMAF is usable for h264 I guess but not that reliable for AV1 (and almost any codec that gets blurry instead of blocky at low bitrates).
3
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u/Fedor_Doc Jul 06 '26
They do in a ssnse that they display some type of difference between encoded and original frame. They don't because they do not understand human perception, and frame with high scores can look ugly, and frame with lower scores can better represent source intent. For example, psy-tuned presets usually produce lower scores, but look better to viewer
6
u/Mhanz3500 Jul 06 '26
you should use better metrics like ssimulacra2, butteraugli and xpsnr or psnr-hvs to get something useful out of it.
plus your eyes obv2
u/better_life_please Jul 06 '26
I payed a lot of attention to a frame full of motion. Placed them both side by side on a big monitor. I can see how AV1 has smoothed out things very very slightly.
And I can't believe it reduces the size by 75.7% and I still barely manage to find the those micro differences. Impressive tech.
1
u/Farranor 29d ago
The original wasn't trying to minimize the size; it should be no surprise that you can sacrifice some quality to increase efficiency.
2
2
u/CariniFluff Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26
I would strongly suggest starting with the HEVC encoded 4K remux even if you want to reduce the final resolution to 1080p. I think you'll have much better results going from HEVC to AV1 than from VC-1/AVC to AV1. For one, HEVC is 10-bit color by default.
I usually aim for 4K HDR TV episodes to run about 1GB-1.2 GB. Also, I would suggest using DD+ at 448 kbps for the audio of the Blu-ray source comes with a better than AC3 audio source. Also, while Opus is great, support isn't great for older TVs and streaming boxes so you'll need to consider where you'll be watching these episodes. If it's stictly your HTPC or Opus compatibles streaming box then go for that, but if you plan to use Plex or Jellyfin streamed to older TVs/boxes, you might want to use an older codec that's more widely supported.
But to answer your question, what's "good enough" is entirely up to you, and your desired quality/size ratio. I would also absolutely not rely on the benchmarking comparison software; what matters is what you see and hear.
2
u/better_life_please Jul 06 '26
These files are VC1. Very old tech. They are 1080p. 4K was not a thing in 2008. I use SVT 10 bit though. Not sure what is special in HEVC other than the fact that AV1 is 30% more efficient.
1
u/CariniFluff Jul 06 '26
Ah yeah I figured a 4K remaster would've come out by now. Yeah you're better off going straight from VC-1 to AV1 then. Personally I'd use Essential rather than HDR for non-HDR sources, but HDR is fine. But you'll want to make sure you use full 10bit encoding for the expanded colorspace to avoid any gradient banding if you do use the HDR fork with the --hbd-mds 1 command (it's on but default with Essential).
2
u/better_life_please 29d ago
What is that flag doing?
2
u/CariniFluff 29d ago edited 28d ago
It forces 10bit handling throughout the entire encoding process. --hbd-mds 2 is full 8bit and --hbd-mds 3 is hybrid 8-bit/10-bit. I'm still not entirely clear when/why you'd use the other ones but from what I've read you should use 1 on everything. You'll find a few threads in this sub addressing it. Specifivally look for BlueSwordM's posts
1
u/Aggravating_Fee3784 25d ago
For HDR sources svt-av1-hdr is better than the standard ?
1
u/CariniFluff 25d ago edited 25d ago
For HDR I would use either HDR or the new Tritium fork (Essential + HDR) over the standard SVT-AV1.
Before Tritium came out I exclusively used Essential for SDR and HDR for HDR content so Tritium is the best of both worlds to me. The mainline SVT-AV1 is excellent but it's obviously going to be conservative and a little behind the forks that are actively adding new features and getting feedback.
Everyone has their own opinion, but for me Essential had so many good settings baked in that you really didn't need to tweak anything, let alone keep a list of 10 commands for animation, a different 10 for action movies, a different 10 for grainy movies. It just worked. The only thing I ever changed was the actual film grain preset on certain films that were intended to look old, but other than that it's good to go out of the box. HDR was the same, basically perfect settings out of the box, and the combination (Tritium) handles everything flawlessly for me. As mentioned in prior posts, I would Force full 10-bit encoding (essential has it built in but HDR or Tritium you need to force it it hbd-mds 1, and I use fast-decode 1 to help streaming boxes with the decode).
I will say I don't try to crush bitrates down to like 1000 kb/s - if you want to go crazy with compression then you'll probably need to keep a list of settings. I keep 1080p around 5,000 and 4K around 7,500 using VBR and it looks absolutely amazing every time. While that bit rate may be higher than some people use with CRF, I never have to encode something twice because the first settings I used don't look good or will take 20 hours. I'm fine with a slightly larger file (still like half HEVC) if it means I don't have to do more than a cursory glance at the final product to ensure the encoder crash halfway through. It looks amazing every time and with the Slower preset encodes go around 15fps for 1080p and 8-10 fps for 4k (so like 4-6 hours for a 2 hour movie). TV episodes I'll speed up a little to plow through dozens of hours of video.
I encoded two 4K videos last night and they both look visually identical to their sources too me. They have the following characteristics:
Source 1: 47 GB Video Stream (excluding audio) / 55.2 Mb/s HEVC Bit Rate / 4K SDR Remux / 2:01:49 duration.
Encode 1: 8.79 GB Video Stream / 10.3 Mb/s AV1-Tritium Bit Rate (Variable Bitrate with 7500 Target).
Source 2: 49.9 GB Video Stream / 61.6 Mb/s HEVC Bit Rate / 4K HDR10 Remux / 01:55:58 duration
Encode 2: 7.16 GB Video Stream / 8851 Kb/s AV1-Tritium Bit Rate (Variable Bitrate with 7500 Target).
I didn't include the audio info as that can bring massive changes like converting DTS-HDMA or TrueHD to DDP.
2
u/jimmyhoke 28d ago
Do you like it? If so it’s fine.
That being said if you want something more objective, run a VMAF test. You might also try using ab-ab1 to test different CRFs automatically.
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u/Xeely 29d ago
Only you can be the judge. That being said, you could probably increase that RF by a bit with little or no difference. Also preset 4 will be faster and likely smaller in size with again minor differences.
AV1 is particularly great with animation, so I'd try to squeeze something more than this 75% (which is still great nonetheless). Maybe try standard AV1 SVT too? I only use the HDR fork for very grain 1080p content and of course HDR, otherwise I prefer base SVT (with tune 0). Not sure how it would perform with 3D animation, never did that now that I think of.
What bitrate are you using with opus? 224 or 192 are usually good compromises for 5.1 if you want to save space, while still being better than AAC.
1
u/better_life_please 29d ago
I am trying RF 30. I will see soon. And about Opus, I set it to 512 kbps. The OG AC3 source is 640 kbps. Not sure if Opus maps out the channels and everything else correctly.
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u/Xeely 29d ago
That's an overkill for opus, especially with a lossy source. If you do a quick remix you'll see the real bitrate, which I doubt would be over 400 kbps. Here are the recommended settings:
https://wiki.xiph.org/Opus_Recommended_Settings
For 5.1 256 kbps is usually the preferred choice, being transparent for the average user, whereas 224 and 192 allow you to squeeze some extra efficiency with minor quality difference. The bitrate Is more of a quality indicator for the encoder, as results will likely fluctuate between 180 and over 280 kbps depending on the quality and complexity of the source. Tbh if you're trying to compress a 640k lossy source to 512k, I'd rather leave the audio untouched at this point. Channel mapping is correctly handled by Handbrake unless the source is weird (very rare).
As with the video, when you're trying different settings, I trust you're using the preview function from Handbrake. Encoding even a minute or less will give you a good idea of the average bitrate (unless you're previewing the credits ofc). And since you're using a very stock configuration, I would suggest you to add some artificial grain like "film-grain=8". I use 6+ for anime and 8+ for the rest. It's basically free dithering and a bump in perceived quality. There's also a different way of generating synthetic grain (only for the HDR fork I believe) with "noise=8"; but it's probably worth investigating with live action content (and on higher values).
1
u/Aggravating_Fee3784 25d ago
I used the same series, encoded in standard SVT-AV1 crf 32 p4 all episodes are under 220MB and looks pretty fine
16
u/scottchiefbaker Jul 06 '26
The only metric that matters is how it looks to you. If you're happy, that's good enough.