H.264 vs HEVC vs AV1- For Recording + Support, Editing & Uploading 

AV1 is newer open source so encoding and decoding have more implementations. This gives me more hope of AV1 as a codec.

Fun fact. Video is encoded in terms of I-frames (initial frames - full jpeg photos) and D-frames (deltas from the directly preceding frame). So if you click on a particular I-frame, decode is likely to be instant no matter which encoder is used. If you click on a D-frame, it has to search all the D-frames backwards until it finds an I-frame which can start the decode process, it decodes that photo, then plays the deltas (D-frames) forward until it hits the picture you clicked on. Each codec & bit rate will produce e.g. one I-frame then 30 D-frames (the 1 : 30 ratio can vary). So if you have a higher quality encoder it might produce bigger I-frames (which takes more storage) but then more D-frames with more delta-work in each frame (to balance out the high storage of the I-frame but try to keep the picture from degrading too much as each new D-frame always degrades quality). So technically, your random clicks better be really random because I can imagine a 3x difference between clicking an I-frame and clicking the last D-frame in a series - the last D-frame might take 3x longer or even worse ... This explains why a higher quality encoder will be slower to random-seek, the I:D ration might be 1 : 40 instead of 1 : 30 requiring 33% more D-frames to be played on average to play a random frame ...

This was greatly put together. Thank you for this Vex!

I never comment on these but man your video had exactly all the information and tests I was looking for, both on the streaming and recording fronts props

You just recommended me this video and for what it's worth, I find the information you're providing genuinely really useful. I've also watched a few of your other videos. Considering I've just discovered your channel, I'm definitely going to stick by. 👏👏 Keep it up, your channel will get the recognition it deserves eventually if you keep up the pace. And good luck!

Appreciate the breakdown. Very helpful as I start to record and save personal media to my server. File size has become more of an issue than I thought it would.

I thank you very much for this awesome video. Very informative and well edited! Thanks!

Thanks for this video. was what i always wanted to see. comparison between the codecs.

bro im just and random person watching not a subscriber but i see that you did a hard work making this video with every details i really appreciate you and you deserve a subscribe

Thank you for making this video! I know this must have taken you a while to make.

This was so helpful as I just started recording gameplay. Thank you.

Thank you for this enlightening video that delves into the intricacies of video codecs such as H.264, HEVC, and AV1. It was truly fascinating to learn about their performance, variations, and distinctions. Your comprehensive analysis shed light on the crucial aspects of recording, support, editing, and uploading. This valuable insight has broadened my understanding of video encoding, and I greatly appreciate your effort in sharing this knowledge.

Great, well thought out video. Kudos!

Perfect job mate ❤ Well done 🔥🔥🔥

dude SO GOOD and interesting video, thanks man!

this is actually so valuable for me this needs way more attention

Helpful observation, thanks.

AV1 was a gamechanger for me. I can reduce the size of footage in daylight by 50% without noticing a difference zoomed into the picture. And darker evening or night footage i can reduce the size by 70% to 80%. Its mindblowing. I have to use the CPU though, because the footage i work with has to be highest quality. I render at preset 4 and it takes hours but for me its worth it because the size of my archive is much smaller now.

Thanks for this. Helps alot!

That was a super comprehensive video! Really appreciated the timeline test. When editing, I can find myself scrubbing through hundreds of clips and sluggish performance absolutely kills my flow; same for dropping frames during cuts. Nvidia conveniently ommits hardware acceleration for the video formats I work with, namely H.264/H.265 10bit 4:2:2, so I've had nothing to upgrade to from my old GTX 1070, unless I go for Intel Arc or one of their newer CPUs.

best video I've seen in a while on this topic

Hi, big thanks to your video that really helping me out about the quality of each encoder. but, i got a serious question is which should i buy amd or nvidia, let say RX 6600 or RTX 2060 or RTX 3050 or maybe should wait for next budget RX 7500 XT or RX 7600 ??? The thing is, is AV1 is that much important to these days and future? I do like only recording using App from its driver ( Relive & ShadowPlay) any opinions would really helped me! Thankyou!

Great content!

you're video is realy helped me to know what encoder is better for recording video... Thank you👌

Just want to say thank you. I don't use obs but I have mirillis Action!. I could never for the life of me find that perfect balance of quality and file size. I was able to match my settings to yours some names were different on mine it was in Mbps which would be 18 instead of 18000 kbps on OBS. However recording some system shock gameplay at 1440p for 5 minutes gave me some awesome looking footage I was happy with at 650mb roughly it was not 700 I'm sure. I believe another key element in my file sizes used to being 3 gigs for 5 minutes was my frame rate being set to 144 and not 60. Now my videos are awesome smooth quality.

Thank you for the video! By the way, which camera do you use?

AV1 is interesting to tinkle with lower bitrate & retain decent vdo quality using GPU encoding. Thanks Bro for the breakdown parts in the vid, a big plus!

This video rules. Very thorough. I was just thinking I wish you had shown video decode on the task manager and then you pulled it up. And you got into how the base version of resolve doesn't have HW decode(except for av-1, bizarrely), something I thing trips a lot of people up. Also: I think youtube encodes natively to AV-1 so perhaps it already being in that codec helped? Not sure.

this is awesome! I got a 4090 to record using the AV1 codec. I'm wondering - should I use CBR and just set the bitrate to like 20-25mbps? Because I've seen quite a few people use CQP as well.

Fun fact: I noticed too much artifacts compression on your H264 capture, so I just downloaded your video without any conversion (VP9 1440p 60 FPS + Opus) to make a test. I converted the video to H264 using the ffmpeg (libx264) from 1:51 to 2:51 applying the veryslow preset at 4000 kb/s. The result was ok, not too much blocks, but far to be perfect, just lightly below the perceptual quality of HEVC. As I suspected, much of the artifacts are due to Nvidia's poor implementation of Nvenc. Fortunately hardware encoding with HEVC and AV1 don't have this problem.

Nice comparison! These new codecs are to improve quality at the lower transcoding settings. Not for the source quality feed. Like the 144p av1 setting youtube has is shockingly watchable on a phone. For streaming, the 1080p 60fps 6000 kbps that twitch defaults to, I experimented and found it wasn't worth it, just like you concluded. It's not worth the large increase in compute power. Needs hardware encoding if you have it. Otherwise, H264 all the way. If you have the bandwidth, there's no reason to use anything but H264 because of how fast it is on modern hardware. The main benefit comes from transcoding to the lower bitrates which isn't your problem on these streaming platforms. At the 480p 1000 kbps setting twitch uses, there was a HUGE improvement with AV1. It was so massive when I did my test I thought I did something wrong at first. I also tested out h266 (requires some faffing about) and found h266 was a small to decent improvement over av1 in almost every way especially at 1440p or higher resolutions. Encoding times require optimization though. Basically, it's a competitor to av2 which hasn't even seen a public announcement. Also for your editing test, that seems like a software problem. Something isn't working, which is probably because of the free tier of resolve. With a 4090 there is zero difference between any of those codecs at those bitrates. Don't have my 3090 anymore, but it was the same. However, I still only use h265 for transcoding as it's much faster than av1 and the quality differences are generally pretty small if you tune the settings right. Network speeds are high (in non-rural areas) and storage space is comically cheap.

Does 2x nvenc mean hevc stream gets divided between two encoders reducing the streaming latency to half? I use to locally stream my games to my TV. So, would buying an RTX 4070 Ti with 2x Nvenc help reduce the streaming latency to half?

have you tried using the Arc as an encoder along with your gpu? I'm trying to find information about that kind of stuff.

Did u find rendering with an av1 file slower in frames than older codes?

thank you very much!👀

You didn't mention royalty fees for these codecs. Both H.265 and HEVC have royalties attached to their use that can add up to very large numbers (an annual corporate unlimited use license currently costs just under $10 million/year). There are some small volumes of use, and shorter video lengths that are royalty free for now, but the royalty terms can change at any time, and I would be surprised if they didn't start chasing smaller users - especially if AV1 becomes very popular. AV1 on the other hand was designed from day 1 to be 100% royalty free, so paying a little extra for a video card with AV1 encoding might save you a royalty nightmare in the future. The company enforcing these royalties has been making tens of millions from the big streaming and production companies for years, but if those companies convert to AV1, they will need to look for other, probably smaller targets. Also - great vid - your perspective as someone that doesn't have unlimited money for hardware/software is incredibly helpful.

So I have question. So when you record and have audios in different channels with HEVC and then open the file in vegas pro will it create more audio channels in the program?

thank you for your hard work

I have a question. If I were to edit a video on premiere and export it with really high bitrate in x264 & then upload it to youtube, will the video after processing look as the same as a lower bitrate export of x265?

Excellent! Very professional! Yes! People need to be aware that AV1 is cpu intensive, so while streaming might be going av1, it's not there for mobile devices as it will eat up their cpus and battery! But av1 will indeed be the future once decode and encoding is mature!

I wonder if the intel arc 310 would be worth picking up just for the av1 encode? I think the lowest price for one is like $89 pretty good drop in for a media server running low on storage and you could just re-encode your media.

Great video buddy 👍 AV1 is superb with all it's implications as it is still new. 👌 I did a recording on AV1 (RTX 4070) and it looked insane. Looks similar to the game I played on my monitor. There wasn't any difference and what really amazed me, was the file size lol 😆 😂 🤣 I recorded for almost 50 minutes and the file size was 1.84GB lol 😆 😄 🤣 😅 that was the best quality and file size I ever seen by far since recording. 😄 AV1 is the way to go and it will eventually be the future for streaming and recording if you have capable hardware to encode it.

Thank you for this video , i wanna understand more about is AV1 encode better on a gpu than the other , i mean does a 4080 encode better than 4060 ? or they have the same piece of hardware encoder between them (the 4000 series ) ? and if a 4080 encode better than their little brothers in which sens it's better it has less time or in term of quality of video image ? im still tryin to understand how it works and if there is difference between the 4000 series on performance what is the the major factor for that is it the cuda cores , the vram or the clock speed ? will really appreciate your answers sorry about my english it's not my native language keep it up !!

Recently i was exploring recording option on my 3070. The shadowplay is convinient but you have 0 options to configure so obs is the better option. I play on a 120hz screen but it is gsync and i play mostly between 100-110 frames. The recordings always come out as choppy uneven frame time recording not a smooth 60. Is there any way i can set up obs to be better at this?

I didn't look at the channel when I clicked but I was assured once I saw it was you

Hey but arent the RTX 4000 series able to encode AV1

Have you created a new video comparing these encoders for streaming?

Thanks for letting me know about av1 because i was running a 4090 with davinci resolve free version for months without knowing i could encode with obs in av1 and have the ability to use gpu acceleration when editing. BIG HELP

Do you have the studio version of resolve? because if not then there is no hardware acceleration whatsoever. Edit: I didn't know that the freee version allows av1 hardware encoding. The more you know.

Hey brother i have 4060 and i7 13gen hx cpu, i'm using hevc at 16-14 cqp level, what should i do more to get highest quality and how to export file for no quality loss on da vinci? tthanks and you really explained it very well

can you explain how to record in av1 ? or use handbreak to export on av1 ?

Yeh had the same problem with it on my 3900X ended up going HEVC as well. on my old 1080ti which handles this pretty well. just got an Arc 770 16gb for this purpose.

i know this is a prety old video..but let me talk something ^^: - avc/hevc/av1 use a lot of B/P/R- frames (more power to reconstruct the frame) - some software will not use hw even if the gpu supports (why? good question) u can check that DR/Premiere/ Vegas will have a different hw support in some case we need to install hevc extension to be abble to dec/enc in HW (the price for a paid codec) 😑 - the best hw we can get is rtx+intel cpu "K" or "non K" chips ..the mediaengine from intel is FAR the best HW-Acceleration for enc/dec (VC-1/MPEGs/AVC/HEVC/VP9 and AV1) up to YUV4.4.4 - 10/12bit (intel do not trully enc VP9 in HW....is more something like a Virtual HW) the intel "F" chips (no igpu) do not support HW-Acceleration VP8 was dropped on the 12gen cuz this codec is worst than avc Hope someday intel implement support for an "Intermediate codec" like apple with their ProRes codec YT: -google have their own HW to handle all the vids on the YT their HW can enc/dec AV1/VP9 more fast and efficient compared to previous HWs (intel's)...so i think that is the why AV1 processing is more fast -Google is the only one who can Trully Encode VP9 in HW mode (i dono why google not allow others to enc vp9) STREAMING: - HEVC is the best choice for basically all HW (Nvenc GTX1000s or intel 7th gen cpu) on youtube u can use 10bit/HDR and a higher bitrate than ttv (yt allways will transcoding the stream) - AV1 it is more suitable for low bitrate and/or high framerate (because if you can use a lot of bitrate then hevc is enough) - TTV has the "SOURCE" option which is the real quality you are sending (without transcoding) but it is limited to 6mbps and only supports AVC In this case, using a CPU is a better choice or the Nvenc of the RTX30 (this Nvenc offers quality equal to or better than the CPU in the medium profile) but if you have the CPU to use the slow profile...USE it.

Hey man you're videos are awesome. I just wanted to ask you if i've set my OBS right. Currently i've set it to use AMD HW AV1 at CBR 70000kbps Balanced Preset keyframe 1 profile main. I've tried Quality Preset but the footage is super stuttery and unwatchable. So is this a good OBS setup??? I've set 1080p Base and 2160p Output Resolution and 60FPS in the OBS settings aswell. The process priority is Normal. Please tell me if this is all well and in the norms. Thanks :)

uuuuh I am just hoping someone can answer my question. see I download movies but the source gives me options of AV1 or h264 and I noticed that the AV1 size is always smaller but i don't know if its of worse quality My question is this in which format should i download my movies ?

5:45 In case you were wondering if you can use HEVC for streaming

You can pop in an Intel ARC card (A380 is about $100) and get hardware AV1 as long as you have the slots available.

You were using DaVinci Resolve's free edition, right? That's why you see a lot of stuttering in AVC and HEVC, it's because the free version doesn't support hardware encoding and decoding for AVC (H.264) and HEVC (H.265), but supports it for AV1. That snappyness you saw on AV1 was manly because your graphics card was handling the decoding. With DaVinci Resolve Studio, every codec is supported for encoding and decoding, so you may see no difference between the codecs. Yeah, you said that later in the video, sorry! Hehehe nice content!

You mentioned that video quality is a function of codec and bit rate but you didn't mention the encoding preset being used. That is to say that you can encode the same file with the same bitrate and codec but have different quality results based on the preset. Lower presets tend to be higher quality but take more processing power. So while you have to use preset 11/12 to live encode AV1 in software, you might use preset 4 to hardware encode which will come out with a higher quality result. So for those of us with hardware accelerated HEVC, we're comparing a much higher quality preset HEVC against a very low quality AV1 preset and HEVC is generally coming out just a little ahead. With this in mind, and that this video is a bit old now, it might be an idea to revisit this with hardware AV1 encoding.

Is this only relevant for streamers? Or is there any other application?

Best. Video. Of. All. Time. #BVOAT - You got a sub my fellow creator!

what mic do you have?

this is a great video.

The h264 and 265 have custom encoder options 1) fast decode 2) 0 Latency. You can fast forward and cut with 0 lag even on old CPU.

if a cut is not at the keyframe it has to render the i-frame and then decode the needed frames till the selected frame. ( so playing back without the encoding its going to stutter)

I generally use "generate optimized media" in DaVinci just to eliminate scrub choke. Gives me a chance for a bathroom break, and a cold beverage before I start editing.

incredible

You didn't mention the encoder quality level of the recordings. For example, 16000 medium setting looks good as 20000 veryfast setting. Quality level (preset) makes hude difference.

How to edit hevc videos in davinci resolve? Sorry newbie here

AV1 Exporting is supported, i have an intel arc a770 and i have the option available in davinci studio version

Thank you

really really cool

3:03 you're showing NVENC H.264 settings while talking about AV1?? The comparison is worthless if you're using the fastest preset for AV1

3:25 you're are correct to say that HVEC(X265) is a successor to AVC (X264). BUT AV1 is not a open source version of hevec , AV1 is a upgrade from hevec, but they had to dodge all patent traps that could led to a lawsuit. The magic of AV1 is how they can make thing still look good on very low bitrate... Like a full movie on less than 600kbs and still looks good for watching on tv. The main weakness of AV1 is how they tend to blurry stuff. But the tech is evolving fast. This video is one year old on this day. And so much have improved by now And they might still keep improving it as Netflix is forced to abandon X265 due to a lawsuit and copyright battles

thanks

AMD AV1 encoder is really great! I use CBR 80000 Kbps 0 e interval, Preset Quality and record at 4k60 FPS. I get around 50 GB file size for hour and a half of video recording which is awesome! ( I could probably go lower with bitrate but it's 4K60FPS so I would probably be compromising quality.

DaVinci Resolve supports AV1 exporting, but only in the Studio (paid) version. It's limited to x264 / x265 only on free version.

PERFECT timing with this. Just did my home build in Dec; 5800X3D and a 6700XT. My old laptop was rapidly dying,m and has since died. It held aaa 1080Ti. Ever since the transition to the desktop. my video blurs, and gets stutter introduced. Neither the stutter nor the blur shows when playing, but both are disappointingly frequent in recording/playback. I was at AMD AVC H.264 at 2500 kbps and getting blockiness. Switch to HVEC at 4k kbps, and the video goes away entirely, only audio gets recorded. Same with AV1.

AV1 decoding/encoding algorithm is much better than even the h.265 paid version, with only issue is the algorithm is branch heavy and sequential so only CPU can run it for a while, and creating a hardware IP for it takes huge amount of expertise..

💪💪

you missed ultra low bitrate testing. many people dont have stable high speed upload, and are capped to 5000 (or less) kbps as upload. this also applies if they want to upload a 3 or 4 minute video to something like discord for sharing, while still keeping it under the 25mb limit. the differences in quality between h264 and av1 is even more stark the further down in bitrate you go, and even a 1080p, 1000kbps video will look watchable (tho blurry) with av1, while looking like a pixelated mess and basically unwatchable with h264. thats even if you encode with placebo preset with h264, while encoding at level 10 with av1.

imagine av1 encoding/decoding for remote game streaming from the cloud etc!

Thank God ppl like u exist helping others in need and finding solutions to all our problems. Thanks Bro!

You should always use Handbrake for encoding tests. Has NVENC support for everything. AV1 is busted though.

algorithm bump

the thing is doesnt h.265 compress the footage by half. this is what you want for streaming. whats the use of av1 if it doesnt compress it enough. eg sending a 6 mbps stream at 3mbps is what you want long term for platforms.

POV: you tried AV1 and the computeeee sounds like an industrial vacuum 💀

AV1 is alot more efficient then HEVC. Rather than encoding AV1 at the same bitrate as AV1, you can use a lower bitrate for the same image quality, saving disk space / bandwidth. That's it's true benefit

AV1 10bit looks really good

I made some vids on av1 buut other than my pcs any device which we have can't do anything with it without umm you know recomputing to something else and i forget about that and yep i have ARC so not much a problem

well if you wwant true av1 you need eiterh a rx 7000 series gpu or a nvidia 4000 series gpu, they wil look way better then using even the best cpu

You should remake this video since now u can use all cores of 5900x

Av1 on Nvidia is known to be the worst out of the bunch. In terms of Quality. AMD and Intel are a much better pick when it comes to Av1 encoding quality Which is ironic as AMD has been known for lackluster hardware encoding. But ay, they really did a good job on the Av1 encoding for RDNA3, they also improved h.264 on it.

HEVC AV1 is top notch on 40xx nvidia best encoder ever (gpu)

5:48 thats false . u can stream with HEVC like i did on my channel on tales of XILLIA recently at 4300 kpbs 1440p 60 fps.

theres flaw with h265 or HVEC codec is editing software intentionally refuse to read it so h264 is no choice but to use it

are u a god?

10/15/23