H.264 vs. H.265/HEVC

TKFT · January 20, 2015

I don't know if this is the right place for this but here it goes.

I have been digitizing some of my movies and TV shows using handbrake and was wondering if there is any real disadvantages to using H.265/HEVC other then it being super slow (I assume because of no hardware acceleration).

Also I have heard that mkv is better then mp4 but mp4 files seem to be smaller and are more compatible. So are mkv's better or should I use mp4.

Thanks.

dalekphalm · January 20, 2015

I don't know if this is the right place for this but here it goes. I have been digitizing some of my movies and TV shows using handbrake and was wondering if there is any real disadvantages to using H.265/HEVC other then it being super slow (I assume because of no hardware acceleration). Also I have heard that mkv is better then mp4 but mp4 files seem to be smaller and are more compatible. So are mkv's better or should I use mp4. Thanks.

MP4 vs MKV are just containers. The insides (guts) depend on the codec used. Assuming both files are encoded using the same codec with the same settings, (Eg: H.264 w/ Quality Level 18), then the files will be basically identical in file size.

The main difference is the additional features supported (types of subtitles, etc etc).

I personally prefer MKV because it has more features. If the file sizes are different (More then a few MB for a movie), then you're likely encoding them differently.

H.265/HEVC is a higher compression codec. It's ideal with 4K high res files. It's more processor intensive to playback H.265/HEVC files though, since not much has hardware acceleration/decoding for it yet.

Assuming you're ripping 1080p Blu-ray or 480p DVD content, then I'd probably just stick with H.264 for simplicity.