A lot of TV shows are direct rips from streaming services and they don't use H.265 because of the ridiculous licensing it comes with.

I suspect AV1 will become much more popular for streaming in a few years when the hardware support becomes more common. It's an open source codec, so licensing shouldn't be an issue. Then we will see a lot more AV1 releases.

x265 playback is more demanding than x264 playback

By a factor of 2 with the same bitrate. But you only need half the bitrate for the same quality (SNR) so it really isn't.

However, encoding is about 10x more demanding in terms of bitrate, or 5x for the same quality. This may be worth it for long-term storage or wide distribution over limited bandwidth (torrenting), but not for one-time personal use.

Go AV1... In my direct experience the space saving is simply amazing at the same quality.

265 doesn't seems to be the future since all Android are going to support AV1 by mandatory from A14.

Some notes: Don't use GPU to reencode you will lose quality.

Don't worry for long encoding times, specially if the objective is long term storage.

Power consumption might be significant. I run mine what the sun shine and my photovoltaic picks up the tab.

And go AV1, open source and seems pretty committed to by the big players. Much more than h265.

RARBG was so good for this, their releases were of such good consistent quality

If you search for ORARBG on therarbg site you can still find some OG releases and not random YIFY crap

MeGusta and Im pretty sure all other x265 groups aren't really considered official scene releases and usually the sources are the larger x264 scene releases. I've found that you can get the same if not better results as MeGusta encoding with a simple -cq 27 with the nvenc_h265 encoder which is reasonably fast.

A good portion of the world thats pirating media is playing it cheap junk with 10+ year old CPUs that can't handle x265, most do not have terabytes of media they just watch and delete so overall size isnt a huge issue, most likely when a new codec does become more mainstream, it won't actually mean smaller releases anyway, it will just mean better quality ones.

In the 00's the standard everyone used was 800mb DivX because thats the size CD-Rs came in, over time, going into the 2010s we got x264 releases but the targets were around 4-8gb usually and by that point the size of optical media didn't really matter since flash drives are cheap and reusable and overall internet speeds for people continues to increase as well so its more likely that when the day comes, the scene will probably coalesce around something like 8-16gb per release.

I’d be interested to know how many of the streaming services natively offer x265. If it’s not many, then I could understand why release groups wouldn’t wanna re encode (e.g. it wouldn’t be a true WEB-DL anymore)

There's always the chance that compatibility / breadth can be a factor. I don't know how much more demanding 265 is than 264 but if it is "noticeable" / "enough", if it means someone can't play the content in their (smart) TV set or on their phone, it makes sense then to release for the more compatible option / avoid a dual release.

I had no idea about the differences with h264 / 265.

Interesting article to skim here for the uninitiated https://www.techspot.com/article/1131-hevc-h256-enconding-playback/

I only download h265 because my drive is filling up as well. I can usually play it back easily in software, except for film grain that wrecks the performance

I've just recently started using tdarr to convert all of my media to x265on 14/02 and so far I've saved 4.02 TB of what was 28.12TB media collection. (The number isn't a true reflection though because new episodes and shows have been added to that library since I started)

I'm letting tdarr manage the conversion process and once up and running meant that my NAS, desktop, my NUC and a mini pc are all plodding through and converting when I'm not using them for other things.

If you are worried about the disk space being taken and have some CPU time you can devote to the conversion process then I'd suggest it's worth looking into tdarr.

I've done a bunch of transcoding of things to x265 in the past (as I'm sure everyone is aware transcoding isn't GREAT but cuts down on storage costs). With that said I've now moved to AV1. I don't use GPU encoders at all as I found the quality to be pretty terrible. I just use a custom written ZSH script to go through and check the current format (it also converts audio to OPUS too)

My raspberry pi doesnt transcode h265 very well at all. Much easier to expand the storage until I can upgrade to something better