I'm planning to convert my video collection from h.264 to h.265 in order to save disk space. Source files are in mp4 and mkv containers.
The videos are mostly watched using mpv. Especially for the videos from the action cam, single stepping should work smoothly in both directions (using ,
for backward and .
for forward stepping). In my test results so far, the h.264 videos work very well, but the h.265 only work a few steps backward (maybe up to the latest I-Frame), but then any further step is extremely slow (up to two seconds for every step).
I've followed the instructions found in How to generate an MP4 with H.265 codec using FFmpeg?. I've tried mp4 and mkv as container formats for the output with unfortunately the same result. These are the commands:
ffmpeg -i IN.mp4 -c:v libx265 -c:a copy -x265-params crf=25 OUT.mp4
ffmpeg -i IN.mkv -c:v libx265 -c:a copy -x265-params crf=25 OUT.mkv
Is there anything I can do to make stepping / searching easier for mpv or is it a general problem with h.265 ?
Edit:
I would like to add that the issue only occurs when single stepping backwards. "Normal" searching (i.e. going backwards by 10 seconds or one minute using the cursor keys) works without any problem in the created h.265 videos.
ffmpeg -i IN.mp4 -c:v libx265 -c:a copy -crf 25 OUT.mp4
. Past that, x265 is very CPU intensive. So if your system is a bit on the under-powered CPU side, that could account for the slowness,