Hello just making a poll, which one do you prefer? personally I prefer x265 but since the rarbg falldown i’ve seen that almost all 1080p rips are in x264, what do you think about that, and do you recommend any place to find more x265 content beside those in the megathread?
H264 then encode to h265 manually
Unless you’re specifically grabbing those high bitrate archival copies you really shouldn’t be re-encoding from one lossy codec to another lossy codec.
transcoding is certianly not ideal, but some releases have obscenely high bitrates and if you’re more concerned about archival than max fidelity reducing size by a factor of 5-10x (h264->av1) is worth it for me.
It’s hard to get to know if encode is good encode :)
Are you getting the highest bitrate release you can before re-encoding? You can only make the quality worse by re-encoding. It’s just the way lossy compression works.