H.265 VS H.264- Difference Between HEVC and H.264

• Tweet

• Tweet

Have no idea what’s the difference between H.264 and H.265 as a lot of posts saying that this two compression codec look the same, the only difference is that the H.265 file size is much smaller. The following part will offer you a detailed comparison of H.265 and H.264. You will have a clear idea of what’s HEVC and H.264 and also the obvious difference between H.265 and H.264.

Definition of H.264 and H.265

What’s H.265?

H.265/HEVC or High Efficiency Video Codec, which is first appeared in 2013 as a true successor to H.264. For this reason, HEVC is also known as H.265, or MPEG-H Part 2.

What’s H.264?

H.264 is a popular standard for high definition digital video, and for good reason. A codec based on the H.264 standard compresses a digital video file so that it only uses half the space of MPEG-2 (the DVD standard), to deliver the same quality video. This means you can enjoy stunning HD video the way it was meant to be seen without sacrificing speed or performance.

HEVC VS H.264: Difference between H.265 and H.264

HEVC’s main advantage over H.264 is that it offers roughly double the compression ratio for the same quality. This means that a video file encoded with HEVC can occupy half the space of its H.264 equivalent with no noticeable change in quality, or the same amount of space with improved quality.

Since H.265/HEVC has some many great benefits when compared with H.264. In addition, it is also the trend of future compression codec as more and more video are delivered with 4K resolution video. Therefore, for those people who wish to compress HD video without damaging the file quality to save more space, it would be a good option for you to convert video to H.265, in addition, you can also get better visual quality when encoding SD video to H.265/HEVC codec. Not knowing how to convert video to H.265, all you need is a powerful H.265 encoder software.

Best tool to encode video to H.265

After a lot of online testing and comparison, we finally settle on Pavtube Video Converter Ultimate. As an one stop solution to encode and decode H.265, you can not only use the program to encode 4K/HD H.265 MKV/MP4 from Blu-ray/DVD/digital video but also decode H.265 to common video such as H.264, AVI, WMV, MKV, FLV, MPG, MOV, WebM, 3GP, etc.

The main merits of this program is that it supports hard-ware encoding acceleration. You can get up to 30x faster H.265 codec encoding speed as long as you run your computer on Graphic card that supports Nvidia NVENC technology. If you wish to decode H.265 to H.264, you can also get up to 6x faster H.264 codec encoding speed as long as you run your computer on Graphic card that supports Nvidia CUDA or AMD App technology.

For Mac users, you can switch to download Pavtube iMedia Converter for Mac to convert video to H.265 on macOS High Sierra, macOS Sierra, Mac OS X El Capitan, Mac OS X Yosemite, Mac OS X Mavericks.

Tips: Hard-ware encoding acceleration is not available for the Mac version.

Step by Step to Convert/Encode Blu-ray/DVD/Video to H.265

Step 1: Import video or load Blu-ray/DVD disc into the program.

Start the program on your computer, click “File” > “Add Video/Audio” to import digital file formats into the program, for load Blu-ray or DVD disc, insert your DVD disc into your computer’s optical drive and your Blu-ray disc into an external Blu-ray drive, click “File” > “Load from Disc” to load Blu-ray/DVD disc into the program.

Step 2: Enable GPU Encode Acceleration.

Click “Tools” > “Options”, in the opened “Options” window, click “Acceleration” menu, then check “Enable GPU Encode Acceleration” otpion so that the program will accelerate converion speed when encoding video/Blu-ray/DVD to H.265/HEVC codec.

Step 3: Output video to H.265 format.

Output H.265 MP4 format

Click “Format” drop-down bar, scroll down to select “Common Video” > “H.265 Video(*.MP4)” as the output file format.

Output H.265 MKV format

For outputting H.265 MKV format, select “HD Video” > “MKV HD Video(*.mp4)” to output, then hit “Settings” on the main interface to open “Profile Settings” window, under Video settings panel, click “Codec” drop-down selection, choose “H.265” as your final output file codec.

Step 4: Begin video to H.265/HEVC codec encoding process.

After all settings is completed, hit right-bottom “Convert” button to begin the conversion from video/Blu-ray/DVD to H.265/HEVC encoding process.

When the conversion is completed, you will get a perfect quality H.265/HEVC file with smaller file size for smoothly viewing and streaming on different devices.