[citation][nom]LukeCWM[/nom]He's not an idiot. Everybody hyper-compresses everything, and the quality sucks. Watching a 2 hour 1080p file compressed to 20 GB is still bad, because even if you're lucky and there aren't any artifacts or glitches, the black levels still suck pretty bad.What torque79 wants is the same thing I want: If a file could previously be compressed to 5 GB poorly, let's not use this new format to compress it to 2.5 GB poorly. Instead, let's still compress it to 5 GB but with much fewer compression artifacts. Or at the very least, compress it to 3.75 GB to have a gain in quality and reduction in file size at the same time. (Numbers are theoretical, used to illustrate a point.)I'm looking forward to the day when all HDD copies of movies aren't poor versions of what's on the optical disc. We should be past this. We need what music has with FLAC (and other lossless audio formats): a file that is significantly smaller than uncompressed WAV, but with no loss in quality, with complete bit-for-bit reconstruction possible.[/citation]
Just because a particular implementation is bad doesn't mean the codec itself is bad. If you want high quality h.264 go with the 10-bit x264 encoder with a low RF (20 is default, higher quality is 18, lossless is 0). In general x264 beats all the other h.264 encoders, but very few Blu-Rays use the x264 encoder. For a comparison of the quality of different h.264 encoders, see http://www.compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/h264_2012/
Lossless HD video is completely impractical (ffv1 is like flac, but still not practical). What you want is an encode with TRANSPARENT quality, meaning it is still lossy but you can't tell the difference between the source and output.