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

Should you render in H264 vs H265 for YouTube? In this video I discuss both the render times and video quality on YouTube if you encode videos in H265 compared to H264. While HEVC is generally considered to be the better and more efficient codec, H264 still beats H265 encoded video on YouTube at a resolution of 1080p. At 4K and 1440p, you are better off rendering with H265 - both as its generally faster and because of much better visual quality

Timestamps:
00:00 H264 vs H265 for YouTube
00:44 Testing Methods
01:14 H264 vs H265 Render Times
03:45 How to play H265 videos on Windows
04:45 Best codec at 4K
06:23 Best codec at 1440p
07:48 Best codec at 1080p
09:21 Conclusions

#H264 #H265 #YouTubeTips

[dgibbsfl]

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 Youtube platform when doing the uploads?

[markplutowski]

Love the data-driven approach for quantitatively comparing video quality

[PeakPerformanceReviews]

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

[theivadim]

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 YouTube and I wasn't happy with the image quality at 1080p. But 1440p an 4K looks good. I think I'll keep uploading H265.

[AzuosCentrall]

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

[nitish]

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

[sobhhi]

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

[rajmir]

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

[foodnear]

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

[vannhantran]

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

[PhysicalSecurityXP]

Thank you so much for your efforts, keep it UP

[Aronnax-]

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!

[Linets.]

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

[paulboyce]

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. 👍

[thisnameistaken]

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?

[DracuPlays]

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

[DetonaHard]

Very helpful! I was confused as to why my H265 recordings were worse than my H264 recordings, at 1080p.
Now it makes sense 😅

[MarylandDevin]

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

[GamingForTheRecentlyDeceased]

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

Can you talk about AV1 codec using Voukoder?