H264 vs H265 for YouTube: Which Codec to use at 1080p, 1440p & 4K 

First I want to mention that I appreciate guys like you devoting this kind of time to topics such as this. I had an interest in doing more of a deep dive into CODEC as it related to rendering. I have recently acquired a significant upgrade in video recording hardware that will do H.264 and H.265 CODEC as well as HLG and D-Log M color settings. The downside that I wasn't prepared for was the doggishly slow rendering times. It is amazing that people generally have no idea why and the reason I found myself doing the deep dive on the research. My computer is running on a 64 bit buspath with an AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 4750U 8 core 18 thread CPU with onboard Radeon Graphics and 32gb of RAM. I had this computer built by Lenovo to be able to handle such things as video rendering as I got more in-depth with it. I am still learning and still playing around with different parameters. I have what should be a simple and basic question for you. When you do post processing on your video clips, do you first render each individual clip with overlays and then go back and super select pieces of those original (and edited) clips to trim in to a larger completed video or do you do all of the trimming and organization of your clips into the desired timeline story and then render all of the various edited scenes pasted together as a finished video? It seems like color grading and the other adjustments rendered into each individual RAW clip and then useing those renders for the final timeline edit would make the most sense but I haven't gotten that far yet and your answer could provide me with a shortcut. Keep in mind that my scenario is with in-the-field scene acquisition (with variables) and not gaming screen feeds. Also please mention where bitrates are managed, is it on the editing platform or the RU-vid platform when doing the uploads?

Love the data-driven approach for quantitatively comparing video quality

Thanks you for the video. This is exactly what I needed. Recently, I've switched to H265 because I started making much longer videos and didn't want to deal with uploading such large files to RU-vid and I wasn't happy with the image quality at 1080p. But 1440p an 4K looks good. I think I'll keep uploading H265.

Great video thanks for this, explained and very well articulated ❤

That's smart and extremely useful information again, thank you very much ;)

Another great video. Very helpful.

This is a great video. Would love to see ProRes 422 included in the next comparison

Thank you for this helpful information. I hope your channel gets a ton of views.

Your channel should have got more views than it should. Really intuitive content

Amazing video. Very helpful.

I was wondering why all my gameplay videos tend to look like garbage while other people's videos are much sharper in motion, regardless of bitrate - others almost always upload at least at 1440p. Also I thought that I'm losing my sanity after seeing that the quality of my videos seemed somewhat random after each upload. Thank you so much!

Hey, great video! I have a question. I also use Davinci Resolve Free. I saw on another video that the H265 is the newer and better codec, and generates smaller file sizes (while producing a higher quality video) but any time I do a test render at H264 and H265 my H265 videos are always around 40% bigger. Any idea why this is if they are supposed to be smaller files? As a bonus question do you know the approximate Mbit of the individual "automatic" quality settings (least, low, medium, high, best) in Resolve?

thanks for covering this!

this is fabulous info, thank you :)

Been doing close to year youtube and started uploading my 1080p videos as 1440p etc your videos have been very helpful thank you 😁👍👍

thanks for your wonderful work I was wondering if I upload 4K HDR 4:2:2 Video what's is the best Codec? how much bitrate should we use for best quality? thank you

I was looking for a good answer in quality and compression. Thanks for the simple to understand explanation. I often download TV or movies and this has been a question for me for some time. 4k often too big files and some so much smaller than you question the quality. But this makes sense that the 265 is half the size. 👍

finally someone who made a detailed video about h264 vs h265, I use h265 at 51k bitrates for RU-vid Live streaming and the quality is far better for 1440p

Always making quality videos. 👌

thanks man! all clear! cheers!

nice one, but can you also make a export setting video with all the H265 setting explained like- high, main, main 10, hdr color, slowest, vbr or cbr in hevc etc. thanks for the video

Wow! This is top content! Thank you!

Could you next time talk about the editing process with these codecs? I recently switched over to 265 and recording with cqp instead of cbr and now editing is a nightmare. I have to make proxies because the footage when scrubbing is laggy. What's the optimal best looking, optimal file size setup on obs that works well when editing. I ended up buying davinci studio for the video card encoding but it's still slow when editing without proxies

great work!

Thank you very much for the in depth video. One Question: Should I use H.265 when I upscale 1080p to 4k? I am very uncertain, because after all it is still 1080p, isn't it?

Thanks for your effort❤❤❤❤

You saved me. I have been uploading 1080p so far. Suddenly I moved to 4k. RU-vid was not able to give quality visuals. You actually have the root cause

A year later later but this still seems to be the case. I just switched to 265 and my 1080 upload test looks like trash. I upscaled same clip to 4k in render export and it looks much better. I had to find out what was going on. Thank you for this video

And AV1? Great video as usual! 👌

Your spreadsheet doesn't explicitly state if those bitrates are based on h.264 or h.265 exports or what frame rate you're using. It seems like everything is 60fps(59.94?) but again just want to clarify. Thanks!

Si im still a bit confused here, when i record with a insta 360 i use 5.7k at 30 fps then in davinci i edit them after having to use insta softwear to change the format. I did a few things the othert day as follows 1) saved it to my cpmputer using proress 2) again with 265 3) then with 264 the difference with proress was a lot, much clearer, but that was saving to computer not youtube What i dont really get is the bitrate setting as it can be set to auto or maximum. if the insta bitrate is say 40 when im exporting from insta to davinci is it worth have a higher bitrate when exporting the same footage from davinci to the computer or even to youtube. I have also recorded clips in 1080 and then upscaled them to 4k and that makes a difference. so bottom line in your cool video is this, 1080 use h264, 4k and above use h265, when would you upload in proress? sorry for the long post, all the best and yes now subbed sorry just seen a llink in the description about best bitrate, will have a watch one more question, when saving to my computer to watch on the computer what should i save the film in, i have a M1 macbook pro

Slightly off topic, but wondering if you could help me. I play on an Xbox Series X, but stream from a PC via an Elgato HD60X capture card. My PC has a 12th gen i7 with 32GB of RAM and an RTX 3060 GPU. Also, I've got Verizon FiOS gigabit service, so my speeds are consistently 800ish mb upload/download even with 7 people in the house using devices online. That said, I heard it said that you should use separate encoders for streaming and recording if you can. In OBS I have the option of using x264 or H.264 for streaming in the advance settings. In the recording section if gives me the options of H.265 or HEVC for the encoder. I've been using H.264 for both and haven't had many issues, the exception being high action scenes while playing Fortnite. I've noticed in the recording that it's skipping/missing frames and jumping around even though OBS never gives me warnings or signs that I'm missing frames due to encoding lag. I've been using CBR as the rate control and had looked into changing that to CQP or VBR, but wondering if it would help to use H.264 for encoding the stream while using HEVC for encoding the recording. Any thoughts?

I have a 4090 gpu and 13900k cpu... When I try to render in 4k60 on free version of Davinci 18 using h265 codec it's soooo slow.. I'm not sure why. I'm new to video editing

I record in 1440p at 44mbs and then upscale to 4k all hevc, when I render I always render at 100% quality, am I doing that right or should I just export at 1440p 100% quality?

if I im not rendering my footage and just uploading it should i still record in h.265 (1440p)

I’m trying to upscale and render as x265 from Vegas. The output video has different color/levels but it looks like the colorspace is the same as the h264 file (in which the color has retained the original sources color). Any thoughts on why h265 is changing color/levels and how to fix?

I've recently performed some render tests that suggest RU-vid is greatly reducing the bitrate of, specifically, its VP9 encode of 1080p. RU-vid's choice to encode a 1080p video with VP9 instead of h264 also seems rather random/hard to determine, so I wonder if this is the cause of the randomness you observed. The time frame that you conducted this experiment in might also be relevant, as RU-vid's 1080p encoding settings seems to be in flux recently. The old adage of uploading in 1440p/4K to force VP9 might even be counter-productive now, as this will force the (bitstarved) VP9 encoder for its 1080p downscale.

this is amazing, exactly what im looking for! it is a magic that h265 provides less render time with higher visual quality. it made me feel like dumb because i was exporting my warzone gameplays on h264 for 2 years 😅 i was rendering at 60 mb bitrates on 1440p but i will start rendering at 40 mb bitrates on h265, since it equals to my old preset, according to your graph. i might render at 60 mb for short videos. i'd like to render 80 bitrates but youtube processing takes too much time, i dont know if its only me. (i have 11-12 megabit upload speed) also, for me it is another good thing that h265 uses gpu. i recently got 5800x3d and while rendering videos on premiere pro, the cpu temperature constantly hits 80 degrees. so i will get rid of another problem by switching to h265. by the way we dont have to change any recording settings for h265 exports, arent we? im recording on h264 codec in obs, must i change it also? and do you think is there any point to render at higher bitrates than the bitrates that we record at? for example, i record at 45 mb's in obs and radeon software, is it pointless to export it at 60 mb's in premiere pro?

h264 to h265 cut my render times in half on my i7 7700k + rtx 2080 !! thanks for all the tips

i've been doing H.265 for over a year now and I recently did in 1080p 24fps s-LOG2 with S-Gamut and color graded in davinci. But when I upload it on youtube it's almost like my entire grade has been stripped. Is it just my eyes messing with me or does this happen to other people?

I have a question, if i encode in H.265 there is a you tube requirements where it says video must be in H.264 format so what should i do?

nice video but I have a question xd, should I put in timeline for a 1080p video to 4k and then render it at 4k? or timeline 1080 and render it at 4k?

I usually record = clip clips on amd with hevc and then rendered it with avc in vegas pro is this good? quality seems fine.

Thanks Helpful

Can you talk about AV1 codec using Voukoder?

Thank you very much, no bullshit video right here and straight to the point!

what about for upscaling videos from youube in VP9 or H265

I can stream h264 with higer bandwidth, but as soon as i start h265, i get continue loss in in network tab in obs.

So if we have 1080p video and we upscale it to 2K or 4K we should render it with h265 as well ?

Which codec is best to save video for editing? if one material is shot on h264, and the other material is shot on h265.

I have tried both on streaming on H.264 in 1080p I get a consistent or smooth streaming while on H.265 is a hit or miss and behaved worse on 1440p, sometimes it works and sometimes it stuttered. I’m using obs to stream in RU-vid.

I have upscaled my video to 4k and rendered to h.265 in Da Vinci resolve. After uploading this rendered video on RU-vid... Whenever i play video at 1080p quality it plays smoothly...But my video lags or jitters while choosing 4k format..Why is this happening ?

This 10 minute video explain better than most encoder weeb.

You can encode H264 with the GPU as well. That's what NVENC does for many years now.

Aren't h265 file sizes much larger than h264 though?

So you mean if we upscale 1080p footage to 4k , should we render it in h.265 ?

can you do a newer cod benchmark and test all the settings?

4:11 I'm sorry, are they selling addons for windows now??

how do you know what it looks like at 60m when youtube compresses it to far below that

I am exporting my 1080p in davinci and upload it to RU-vid. Which is vest for me h.264 or h.265 ???

Food for brain: RU-vid uses different codecs to process what we upload: - avc1 = h.264 for 1080p - VP9 = h.265 (HEVC) for 4K+ - AV1 = NEW HEVC for 4K+

how many bitrate for 1080p60 vids with h265?

lets say i upscale 1080p footage to 4k, should i use h.264 or h.265?

Actually I am always having a doubt that, while recording games should I record h265 directly or record it in any other format and then encode it to h265?

no av1 comparison? it's been a mature codec at the time of this video and stomps h265 into the ground as the "future" of codecs.

my video export faster in h.264 compared to h.265 , & even size is smaller , i tested multiple time same result for all resolutions ,plz update your test results , my config i7 12 gen 3060 gpu

Swiss Quality videos! Со стороны RU-vid было довольно глупо вводить эту механику. То, что RU-vid подменяет кодек в видео с VP9 на AVC1 на малоизвестных каналах с небольшим количеством просмотров только усугубляет ситуацию с дисковым пространством видеохостинга.

me using the forbidden extension named h264ify for my chrome browser and the video loads smooth as silk

Why even?! H265 era never happened. Make something uself such H264 VP9 and AV1 RU-vid output quality comparison

This stupid HEVC extension triggers me. I forgot, that I already had the free version of it (it was free at the beginning) and paid for it again. Worst 1-2 EUR spent.

Soon you can't hardware encode h264? My chromebook from 2013 can, but you can't? And you can't view h265? This is so bizarre to me. I came here wondering about the best youtube and found a video of a man who can't encode 264 wtf. I just checked my cheap laptop if it can encode both and I'm at 9% on a single thread for both h264 and h265 at 1080p. I don't have a graphics card but the igp says sure no problem.

4:09 or just download a codec pack like every sane person.

Thanks for this Video! I render in H.264 1080P60 and my Videos looks, i think very good. Greets