HandBrake-docs/source/docs/en/latest/technical/video-codecs.markdown

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---
Type: article
State: draft
Title: Video Codecs
Project: HandBrake
Project_URL: https://handbrake.fr/
Project_Version: Latest
Language: English
Language_Code: en
Authors: [ Scott (s55) ]
Copyright: 2016 HandBrake Team
License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International
License_Abbr: CC BY-SA 4.0
License_URL: https://handbrake.fr/docs/license.html
---
Video Codecs
============
 
- H.264 (x264): For MPEG-4 part 10, also known as H.264/AVC.
- This is HandBrakes default encoder. It provides excellent performance,
filesizes and quality.
- It is widely supported by players and mobile devices.
- H.264 (Intel QuickSync): For MPEG-4 part 10, also known as H.264/AVC.
- Available on Intel processors with Intel HD Graphics.
- QuickSync is a hardware based H.264 encoder so is very fast, with
significantly lower CPU usage than x264.
- Intel Haswell or newer CPU's are recommended as these offer the best
results in terms of Quality and Filesize.
- You can typically expect larger (but usually not significantly larger)
file sizes and slightly lower quality to an equivilent x264 encode. This
is a trade off that is fine for most.
- H.265 (x265): Also known as HEVC
- This is the next generation of encoder that offers even higher quality
encodes and better filesizes over H.264
- Note, encoding to H.265 is a significantly more complicated process, so
it is expected to be slower than HandBrake's H.264 encoders.
- Playback support is rather limited at the moment, particularly with
mobile devices but this should improve drastically throughout 2015/16
- MPEG-4 (ffmpeg): HandBrake offers FFmpeg's MPEG-4 part 2 encoder for fast,
low quality encoding.
- Better support from older devices such as DVD players and cheap "MP4
Players"
- Lower quality than the H.264 encode option but typically faster encodes.
- MPEG-2 (ffmpeg): HandBrake offers FFmpeg's MPEG-2 part 2 encoder for fast,
low quality encoding.
- Fast Encoding, but requires larger files than MPEG-4 for the same
quality level. Useful for testing but not much else.
- VP8 (Libvpx):
- A free and open video codec which offers significant improvements over
Theora.
- VP3 (Theora): HandBrake can also encode Theora video. Theora video with
Vorbis audio in the Matroska container represents a truly free option for
multimedia encoding.
- However, Theora has yet to reach maturity when measured by quality at a
given bitrate.