I believe you are talking about the 'anime' encoders, as for 'scene' releases, they are all in 8bit h264 AFAIK.

Also when it comes to anime, doing a quick search on Nyaa it looks like 10bit is used on less than a tenth of releases, with h265 being in that same range as well.

I dare say 8bit h264 is still the undisputed king of piracy.

Simple guess/answer: in quantity upload time/bw (x2 for x264) is massively cheaper than encoding time (x100 for x265).

Also: if you’re doing 2160p 10bit HDR, there’s no chance those Rokus are going to play them anyway.

Disclaimer: not involved with the scene at all, so this is mostly educated speculation.

Decent x265 encoding is not that much slower than x265. Going for roughly the same perceived quality, my encode times went up about ~50-70% when switched to x265. With how much better it handles grain in older films, it's well worth the extra time requirement.

But I imagine those in the scene are more interested in being the first with a passable 1080p Blu-Ray rip than they are in cramming as many high quality movies on their iPad as possible before a long flight.

They explained their decision I think it was in late 2017 or early 2018. Reducing bitrate of lower encoder time are not their priority. Even at the same bitrate x264 still beats x265 in terms of video quality. There are some problematic scene x265 just doesn't do well.

If they could reduce bitrate while getting the same quality, they would. If they could get even better quality while having the same bitrate, they would do it too. The problem is at their quality level requirement x264 is still king. And as of late 2018 that still seems to be the case. ( Tuning Encoder is a god damn insane job )

> Also: if you’re doing 2160p 10bit HDR, there’s no chance those Rokus are going to play them anyway.

I have some 10bit 2160p ATMOS remux movies that are huge 50GB MKV files and I stream them over my gigabit LAN to a no-name $80 Android box I got off some obscure Chinese marketplace and it plays them back perfectly with full HDR and my amp gets the atmos signal too.

If your device has hardware based x264/x265 chips it can decode them with very little processing power.

10bit h.265 has wide hardware support. The problem is 10bit h.264, for which hardware support is borderline nonexistent.

You do encoding once, you pay for space/bandwidth forever. Same logic that Youtube uses.

For the scene BW costs are largely distributed so it doesn’t matter.

Being furstcwith the release is. And then you don’t want to spend 10x-50x more time on your encode.

The incentives here are nothing like YouTube.

>10x-50x more time on your encode.

x265 is nowhere near that much slower unless you are using a very high preset. Even preset #9 ("slow") is only about 2-3x slower than x264, in my experience.

They make 4k hdr Rokus