BD Ripper (3D Plus) Possible to get better quality encoding on Nvidia?

[eisenb11]

I've been experimenting with the HW acceleration options, but so far not too happy with the results for h265 and h264.

Normally I create a mkv with sw decode and encode. The h264 file is created with a high bit rate of 12380 kbps using 2-pass. Output quality is great but takes about 1.5 hrs.

Fab has a cuda option, but I'm assuming that that is really nvenc since cuda got deprecated. Is there any way to tweak this for better quality?

I tried both h264 and h265 at 12380 kbps with 1 pass. Encode times are super fast but the quality is lacking. I see significant banding and artifacts.

I was really hoping to switch to h265 but the encode times are too long with sw only encoding. Any help in getting better results would be greatly appreciated.

[eisenb11]

I decided to do an experiment and transcoded a original source file via a bunch of different means.

I've determined that I'm just too picky to get away with using H.265 @ 6190 kbps... so much for cutting my storage space in half!

In the end, it looks like my current plan is to move forward with H.265 @ 12380 kbps.

I ended up picking this because HW encoding is faster than SW encoding, H.265 in HW looks better than H.264 in HW, and H.265 @ 12380 has acceptable quality.

Going to continue running additional tests, but these are my preliminary findings.

Ideally, it would be nice if the H.265 HW and SW encodings were closer in quality. Perhaps future versions of NVENC will be able to address this. I know v8.0 is around the corner.

If any mods / devs are reading this: Curious... Is DVDFab using NVENC? I believe the current SDK is at 7.1.