Genuinely surprised you haven’t heard about HDR before.

It’s not needed for office work, but for media consumption it has been a big thing for at least half a decade at this point. I’m not sure you’ll find a modern TV that doesn’t support it at this point.

VLC is much more versatile, but when it comes to speed/efficiency, MPV run laps around VLC.

Frankly, for anything other than real-time encoding, I don’t actually consider encoding time to be a huge deal. None of my encodes were slower than 3fps on my 5800x3d, which is plenty for running on my media server as overnight job. For real-time encoding, I would just grab a Intel Arc card, and redo the whole thing since the bitrates will be different anyways.

Encoding speed heavily depends on your preset. Veryslow will give you better compression than medium or fast, but at a heavy expense of encoding speed. You’re not gonna re-encode a movie overnight on slow preset. GPU encoding will also give you worse result than CPU encode so that’s something one would have to take into consideration. It’s not a big deal when you’re streaming, but if it’s for video files, I’d much prefer using the CPU.

I consider the ‘good enough’ level to be, if I didn’t pixel peep, I couldn’t tell the difference. The visually lossless levels were the first crf levels where I couldn’t tell a quality difference even when pixel peeping with imgsli. I also included VAMF results, which say that the quality loss levels are all the same at a pixel level.

I was mostly talking about how you organised your table by using CRF values as the rows. It implies that one should compare the results in each row, however that wouldn’t be a comparison that makes much sense. E.g. looking at row “24” one might think that av1 is less effective than h264/5 due to greater file size, but the video quality is vastly different. A more “informative” way to present the data might have been to organise each row by their vmaf score.

Hopefully I don’t come across as too cross or argumentative, just want to give some feedback on how to present the data in clearer way for people who aren’t familiar with how encoding works.

Feels like certain information is missing. You get very different results both in encoding time and file size depending what preset you use.

CRF value also can’t be translated 1:1 between codecs so comparing e.g. h265 CRF 21 to h264 CRF 21 doesn’t mean much.

Here you go, proof at ~2 min in.

Edit: for those who don’t want to use YouTube anymore. If a is the long side and b is the short side of a rectangle. Halving the rectangle will make the long side b and the short side 1/2 a. If the ratio is preserved when halving, we get:

a/b=b/(1/2 a)

a^2*=2*b2

a^2*/*b2=2

a/b=sqrt(2)

Linux Mint is often touted as the most similar looking GUI to windows, so if you want Linux, but looking like windows that might be your best bet. You will find many guides for how to install Linux. If you want to just try it out first (and not just overwrite windows), you’ll need to free up some disk space and create an empty partition to install Linux on.