Encoder Presets are confusing

General questions or discussion about HandBrake, Video and/or audio transcoding, trends etc.
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nolonar
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Joined: Mon Dec 26, 2016 9:22 pm

Encoder Presets are confusing

Post by nolonar »

I've noticed that Handbrake 1.2.2 (and possibly older versions) has an "Encoder Preset" slider.

I understand what that slider does, but the presets themselves are confusing me.

From left to right, those presets are:
  • High Quality
  • High Performance
  • Fast
  • Medium
  • Slow
  • Default
I understand that High Quality is slower but yields better quality than High Performance.
Similarly, Slow is slower but yields better quality than Fast.

But how do they compare with each other?
Is High Quality better than Slow? Is High Performance faster than Fast?
And where does Default fit in all this? Is it comparable to Medium? Or in between Medium and Slow?

These presets would be much less confusing if they were in order, but not only is High Performance listed between High Quality and Slow, Fast is also in between those two presets.

I'd like some more information about these presets, because it's not at all clear to me what each of them actually stand for.

Earlier versions were significantly more obvious, with Fastest, Fast, Medium, Slow, Slowest, Panacea. At least they were in order, so you could tell Panacea was likely slower and even higher quality than Slowest.


I doubt there would be any difference in platforms, but just in case: I'm using the Windows x64 version of Handbrake.
mduell
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Re: Encoder Presets are confusing

Post by mduell »

Which encoder are you asking about?
nolonar
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Joined: Mon Dec 26, 2016 9:22 pm

Re: Encoder Presets are confusing

Post by nolonar »

Sorry, I forgot.
I'm using the H.265 NVEnc encoder.
mduell
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Re: Encoder Presets are confusing

Post by mduell »

The presets you list having previously are roughly the x264 presets (and x265 uses similar set). That encoder should still have those familiar and logical presets.
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s55
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Re: Encoder Presets are confusing

Post by s55 »

I'd like some more information about these presets, because it's not at all clear to me what each of them actually stand for.
You and us both. I've not found any information published by Nvidia that describes the differences.
nolonar
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Joined: Mon Dec 26, 2016 9:22 pm

Re: Encoder Presets are confusing

Post by nolonar »

Since it appears that the presets are provided by Nvidia and nobody seems to know what they do, I've decided to test them myself.
I encoded a 130-minute video using the same settings, only changing the preset.
Quality was set to constant (20 QP).

CPU: i9 9900k
GPU: RTX 2080 Ti

Results are formatted like this:
Preset name, encoding time in mm:ss, file size in bytes (and in GB)

Sadly, I have neither the means nor the knowhow to pass an objective judgement on image quality.

Code: Select all

High Quality         18:50     4980696699 (4.63 GB)
High Performance     14:40     5463259037 (5.08 GB)
Fast                 14:40     5463259037 (5.08 GB)
Medium               18:50     4980696700 (4.63 GB)
Slow                 18:50     4980696700 (4.63 GB)
Default              14:35     5051534842 (4.70 GB)
Some files are the same size, but their SHA 256 indicate that each preset produces different files.

Summary:
HQ, Medium, and Slow appear equivalent, as they take the same time to produce files of the same size (HQ's is 1 byte smaller).
HP and Fast also appear equivalent, for the same reason as above.
Default was the fastest preset, while producing a smaller file than HP and Fast (surprisingly).
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JohnAStebbins
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Re: Encoder Presets are confusing

Post by JohnAStebbins »

On the surface, it looks like the preset names are about as close to meaningless as you can get. If I had to guess, they left room for using more advanced features on more advanced hardware, but don't currently have that capability (or your particular hardware doesn't). Without some quality metrics, we still can't be certain that HQ == Medium == Slow though. If you (or anybody else for that matter) is up for it, there are some tools available that produce quality metrics.

See https://superuser.com/questions/338725/ ... st-quality

It would be really interesting to get one or more of these tools working and do some comparisons between the encoders. I.e. how does nvenc HQ compare to x264 veryfast?
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BradleyS
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Re: Encoder Presets are confusing

Post by BradleyS »

I just finished putting this article together. It should be on the main website soon. https://github.com/HandBrake/HandBrake- ... e.markdown
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