HEVC/H.265 Overview
HEVC (also commonly referred to as H.265) is available to all customers. HEVC is a next-generation video codec that is capable of delivering higher quality content at lower bitrates than its predecessor, H.264.
Encoding recommendations
video_codec_level: constrains the bitrate and coding tree units (CTUs). List of valid values.
video_codec_profile: sets the encoding profile. The currently supported HEVC profiles are: main, main10, main12, main422-10, main422-12, main444-8, main444-10, main444-12. Default: main.
video_reference_frames: Limits the number of reference frames for HEVC. Default: 3.
video_bframes: Limits the number of consecutive bframes used for HEVC. Default: 3.
crf: CRF is a bitrate-control setting, and sets a constant ratefactor. The Zencoder Quality setting determines an appropriate CRF for a given video. So if you set both Quality and CRF, the CRF setting will override Quality. Valid values are 0-51, with lower values being better quality. Generally speaking, you shouldn't have to go below 16; 16 is nearly lossless for most files. Around 24 usually looks pretty good. Around 35 looks pretty compressed.
Sample: HEVC + MP4
Below are sample settings for a job that will create an HEVC output (muxed as mp4) with an additional MP4 output for clients that do not yet support HVEC.
{
"input": "https://user:pass@bucket-name/file-name.mov",
"outputs": [
{
"label": "hevc",
"url": "s3://output-bucket/h265.mp4",
"video_codec": "hevc",
"video_codec_profile": "main",
"audio_codec": "aac",
"format": "mp4",
"size": "1920x1080"
},
{
"label": "h264",
"url": "s3://output-bucket/h264.mp4",
"video_codec": "h264",
"video_codec_profile": "main",
"audio_codec": "aac",
"format": "mp4",
"size": "640x360"
}
]
}