H.264 vs h.265/VP9 for standard definition video?
 

I asked this question in another post but thought it deserved its own thread. I have a collection of home movie files, Video8 captured with ATI AIW 9600 lossless uncompressed AVI at 720x480 resolution. I am now playing with deinterlacing and noise reduction with AviSynth tools like QTGMC and SMDegrain. I anticipate using an MP4 container. . I know that h.264 has been the usual preferred final destination compression codec but what about h.265 or VP9? I know these codecs were primarily designed for streaming HD content but are there any benefits to using them in this setting? Any reason(s) not to use them? I also have a question about encoding software. Right now I am using the codecs that come with VirtualDub2. Anything wrong with this approach? There seems to be plenty of configurable options.

Be careful when deinterlacing with QTGMC and denoising with Temporal filters with motion compensation based on MVTools like SMDegrain, TemporalDegrain, etc.
QTGMC denoises by itself to rebuild the best progressive frames and it is easy to over-process the videos.
Consider to use QTGMC in lossless mode, where while trying to match the original fileds some of the denoise is reduced, like (SourceMatch=3, NoiseProcess=2) or something like that.

Examples of (basic) restoration here, where some are over-processed in purpose:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMs...h1MmNAs7I8nu4g

h264 is very common and largely supported now, but, for example, in Italy all TV channels will switch to h265 by the end of the year, even for SD broadcast.
In the past h265 had problems with interlaced material, now solved because it stores the interlaced video as separated fields, but it is not your case.
It requires more power to code/decode, but (theoretically) reduces final size at the same "quality" of h264.

As per today, I would stay in h264 and keep the HuffYUV master for future work, but YMMV.

Edit: concerning the approach, I only use ffmpeg command line to have full control of all parameters, for example:

I definitely agree with you here. While I have been thrilled with the deinterlacing results I am getting with QTGMC, adding SMDegrain to my script chain definitely is producing an over-processed look, at least at the settings I have tried. Based on your comment, I will experiment more with the noise reduction offered by QTGMC. So far I have only used: QTGMC (preset="slower"). I am new to all of this so just starting with very basic settings.


Appreciate your perspective. Right now, I am leaning towards h.265 but still comparing output and file sizes. I'm actually not using HuffyYUV but keeping my master files as uncompressed AVI. I know, the file sizes are huge but storage space is cheap. I have my entire collection (about 40 tapes) on an 8 TB HD (with a separate backup drive, of course). I know this is probably a topic best left for a separate thread, but I've seen too many examples where the HuffyYUV codec trips up some AviSynth plug-in. I also worry about long-term support. Again, all of this probably best left for another post.

I have not yet ventured into using ffmpeg in command line although it certainly appeals to the geek in me. Thank you for the example!

Yes, in alternative to reduce QTGMC denoise and use SMDegrain you could also experiment to remove SMDegrain and use full denoise capabilities of QTGMC.

I am still waiting the integration of the excellent TemporalDegrain2 inside QTGMC, but we are not yet there:
https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.p...76#post1952976