Can I leave encoder tune at none in handbrake?

ImRyan · October 30, 2017

Can I leave encoder tune at none in handbrake without a bad effect on quality?

Thanks for your help

mariushm · October 30, 2017

Yes, you can leave the tune to none. Though with most movies, deblocking does help (setting it to -1:-1 or -2:-2).

For h264 , tune just changes slightly the default presets :

 Multiple tunings are separated by commas.
 Only one psy tuning can be used at a time.
 - film (psy tuning):  --deblock -1:-1 --psy-rd <unset>:0.15
 - animation (psy tuning):  --bframes {+2} --deblock 1:1  --psy-rd 0.4:<unset> --aq-strength 0.6  --ref {Double if >1 else 1}
 - grain (psy tuning):  --aq-strength 0.5 --no-dct-decimate  --deadzone-inter 6 --deadzone-intra 6  --deblock -2:-2 --ipratio 1.1  --pbratio 1.1 --psy-rd <unset>:0.25  --qcomp 0.8 
 - stillimage (psy tuning):  --aq-strength 1.2 --deblock -3:-3  --psy-rd 2.0:0.7
 - fastdecode:  --no-cabac --no-deblock --no-weightb  --weightp 0
 - zerolatency:  --bframes 0 --force-cfr --no-mbtree  --sync-lookahead 0 --sliced-threads  --rc-lookahead 0

ImRyan · October 30, 2017

21 minutes ago, mariushm said:

Yes, you can leave the tune to none. Though with most movies, deblocking does help (setting it to -1:-1 or -2:-2).

For h264 , tune just changes slightly the default presets :


 Multiple tunings are separated by commas.
 Only one psy tuning can be used at a time.
 - film (psy tuning):  --deblock -1:-1 --psy-rd <unset>:0.15
 - animation (psy tuning):  --bframes {+2} --deblock 1:1  --psy-rd 0.4:<unset> --aq-strength 0.6  --ref {Double if >1 else 1}
 - grain (psy tuning):  --aq-strength 0.5 --no-dct-decimate  --deadzone-inter 6 --deadzone-intra 6  --deblock -2:-2 --ipratio 1.1  --pbratio 1.1 --psy-rd <unset>:0.25  --qcomp 0.8 
 - stillimage (psy tuning):  --aq-strength 1.2 --deblock -3:-3  --psy-rd 2.0:0.7
 - fastdecode:  --no-cabac --no-deblock --no-weightb  --weightp 0
 - zerolatency:  --bframes 0 --force-cfr --no-mbtree  --sync-lookahead 0 --sliced-threads  --rc-lookahead 0

I should have said before but my other settings are

is your answer still the same? I ask because i am not sure if my other settings matter to the encoder tune option i should pick

mariushm · October 30, 2017

There's no "best settings" or "universal" settings, it depends from content to content.

Every option is a trade off between disk space used by the encoding and the quality.

For example, you can improve quality by setting tune film and therefore applying a mild deblocking, but you could get much higher quality increase by changing the constant quality factor from 12 to 11 (in Handbrake, I'm not sure how the slider changes the number, but in x264 smaller numbers means higher quality and more disk space used, higher numbers means sacrifice quality to reduce disk space) ,,, basically the more you get closer to placebo quality, you use more disk space.

The film tune does that deblocking thing which helps the encoder retain a bit more quality in the same amount of disk space (if you keep every other option constant). So if you're constrained by some things (for example your video must have a bitrate of 6 mbps or less), then it makes sense to enable that if it helps with more quality.

It's mostly for movies sources that are already in high bitrate, high quality like bluray copies, or movies you shot with your digital camera with 25mbps or higher bitrates.

Tune film may also help with some games that don't have sharp edges and large areas of color or very sudden changes in colors.

If you have a movie with lots of grain or that are lower quality than tune film may not help you.

tune animation can be helpful for anime, manga and for some games that simulate that effect (cell shading, i'm thinking borderlands, or games like worms reloaded, or games with pixel art

At that RF number (12), using preset veryslow won't give so much increase in quality to be worth it. You could speed up encodings by taking it down a notch to "slower" - the biggest change between slower and veryslow is the number of reference frames, from 8 to 16 ... but most content will never have more than around 10 reference frames, so probably 9n0% of the time, the encoder will try pointlessly to use more than 8 reference frames and slow down encoding with minimal benefit.

encoder profile set to HIGH can help at 720p or higher encodings, it gives the encoder the ability to use more "tricks" to retain more quality in the amount of disk space you use.

Encoder level 4.0 is ok for 720p or lower, but if you want higher resolution, you should set it to 5.0 or something like that, which would work for 1080p or higher. Most video cards can decode level 5.0 videos (or even higher level videos) in hardware.

Level 4 restricts the maximum bitrate to 20mbps so if you have some very high motion scenes with explosions or something, at that CRF 12 you could have a second or so of video which could have a lower quality than possible because you're restricting the maximum bitrate to 20 mbps.

Level 4.2 allows up to 1080p and 50mbps and level 5 allows up to 135 mbps

so yeah, slower , high profile , level 4 or 4.1 for 720p or less, 4.2 for 720p or less than 1080p , level 5 for 1080p, play with CRF setting until you find the amount of disk space per minute you're comfortable with.

And if it's something you want to upload to youtube, just use as much bitrate you're willing to upload, youtube will recompress the content anyway.

If it's for your archive, 10 bit versions of x264 will produce slightly more quality for the same amount of disk space, but video cards can't decode such content in hardware so your movie player will use the processor to decode the movie (which is not a problem) and some TVs won't play back 10bit encoded videos (with h264).