Easiest program to convert DVD for plex?

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JBDragon1 wrote:

H.264 is MPEG-4.  Now if you're talking about H.265 that's a differnt story.  

 

 

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"MPEG-4" video is usually considered to be ISO/IEC 14496-2.  Technically it is similar to H.263.  It has about the same visual quality at perhaps 80% of the bit rate of the MPEG-2 used in DVDs.

H.264 (called AVC by MPEG folks) is ISO/IEC 14496-10 (technically part of the MPEG family system, but very different from the older MPEG-4 video). H.264 is about 2x more effcient than the MPEG-2 that is used in DVDs - same quality at half the bitrate. 

HEVC/H.265 is part of a newer system called MPEG-H and is significantly better than H.264, especially for UHD content.  The goal was the same subjective quality at 1/2 the bitrate of H.264, which was achieved for "entertainment" test sequences - see Table VII here: http://iphome.hhi.de/wiegand/assets/pdfs/2012_12_IEEE-HEVC-Performance.pdf  If you look at the table closely, you'll see that the efficiency is higher for HD/UHD content than SD content.

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JBDragon1 wrote:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding  If course you need to be able to play a H.265 file.  Does it work with PLEX and the PLEX client you're going to be streaming to?   

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The important thing to remember here is that all these codecs are visually transparent if you use appropropriate bitrates.

H.265 adoption has been stalled (due to patent licensing terms) - while H.264/AVC is supported by pretty much anything.  The only reason to use H.265 is because you want lower bitrates/smaller file sizes.  If your players all support it, then that's great.  But I think for most people that's simply not the case, so generally it's safer to go with H.264.