@hellogoodbye
thanks so much for this helpful recommendation, you're a lifesaver. Was looking for an up to date list of UTR encodes for a while and only found an older Google Doc and the uniteam.co page (where mysteriously my login doesn't work anymore) but the Hashlist and especially the RSS Generator were entirely new to me. Now I just have to figure out a way to get this into Radarr. Perhaps the Torrent RSS Feed "Indexer" works, I'll give it a try.

@kf5styk
Let me know how the automation goes?
My current process is download into seedbox, seed for some time and transfer out of seedbox into long-term archiving for plex viewing. For some dying releases, I keep seeding to ensure they stay alive.
For the older releases, I'm doing it in batches of 100 to manage the space requirements of my seedbox. I use deluge as my client and this google chrome extension called delugesiphon to quickly grab it into deluge so I don't need to manually copy in the magnet link. Idk if there's a better way to make the process more efficient.

If we exclude compatibility issues, is x265 really better than x264?

Originally Posted by Cirilla

If we exclude compatibility issues, is x265 really better than x264?

A x265 encode is half the size of x264, same quality.

@Cirilla
Try Tigole's releases, I feel that they are one of the best encoders, if not the best encoder in the x265 HEVC space
If you are viewing on a laptop, tablet, mobile phone, there's hardly any quality difference

I watched some of the more recent Blockbuster movies which were encoded by Tigole - all brilliant quality at a fraction of the disk space. They are meant for archiving and building up a collection, that's why they choose reasonable formats and bitrates. I especially like that almost all their releases are transcoded from source to multi-channel AAC. Since AAC is transparent I personally think of DTS-HD, TrueHD and the likes as a waste unless you have to have it for your AVR.

PS: the QxR feed worked in Sonarr !

Is there a reason why there aren't any QxR torrents on private trackers?

If I was an encoder in a group I would want to make the x265 files a tad bit bigger for better quality. I know most people want it for the space saving but I say quality, quality! But hey that's why I download full blu-ray rips and sometimes encode my own.

x264 = AVC = Advanced Video Coding
x265 = HEVC = High Efficient Video Coding

HEVC main feature is to reduce the filesize, especially for 4K Content (but with some necessary lose of detail), some WEB Sources or Groups Encoding 4K Blurays also use it to present in HDR.
The Settings can be tweaked for high Details too, but it's is more complicated, there are a lot moe options for x265 ecnodes and many have to be set especially for 1080p (as it's usually set for 4K in the presets).

So it depends on the encoders settings - HQ rips with x265 doesn't seem to have any improvement over filesizes, some Groups on the good HD Trackers usually go for Quality without noticeable lose of details.

Well, if the rips are good I'd go for 1080 x265 rips (e.g sourced from 4K BDs), but if they are bad from Scene Groups doing low Bitrate encodes (e.g. from 1080p BDs), I'd probably prefer a good 720 x264 rip, which eventually is even smaller.

So, Overall it depends on the source and the encoders skills and love for details. on sites like HDB or AHD you can be sure to always get a HQ rip, no matter if it's 1080p HEVC or 720p AVC, all in all in doesn't matter as long as the Group providing the encode have high standards, both will be fine.