Most movies for me are in the 4-5 bframe range. If they're used even 3 or even 2% of the time, I let x264 go ahead. Don't know whether it's worth the time hit to you, though.please_help wrote: Thanks for getting involved creamyhorror and thanks for sharing your preferences. I wasn’t sure whether the hit in speed by increasing bframes was actually worth it for general use? After looking at my logs it seems like 3 consecutive bframes are used fairly rarely, generally less than 10% of the time for the random selection of movies I tested and pretty close to the percentage of time that none are used at all.
Blocking artifacts are minimal even at -3,-3. You have to understand that blocking is an inherent result of x264's encoding process, and the deblocker acts to soften the blocks - but in the process necessarily blurs out a bit of detail. For complex or grainy sources, it's better to keep deblocking low so that less detail will be blurred out. I doubt anyone notices the blocks; I have to pause, zoom and look pretty hard to make them out. In normal viewing, they simply look like part of the detail (IMO).With regards to deblocking, I read that deblocking decreases with higher bit rate so if one were to go for crf 18 then deblocking at 0,0 would be similar to deblocking -1,-1 (or something) at crf 20? I guess this is down to personal taste, but I’d rather not risk any blocking artifacts and if I stick to my reason for starting this topic and assume that the HB developers got it right, I would (tentatively) suggest 0,0 for a general use higher-than-high profile?