Wow now that UltraHD is now a thing and you can buy UHD Blu-ray, how do you think about encoding all of this. Well here are some of the things to know:
- X.265 (aka HEVC). This is the latest encoding format. Think of it as life beyond X.264 (aka MPEG-4). It is about twice as efficient so save some disk while you are at it!
- Rec. 709 and Rec. 2020. Ok these are terrible names, but refer to the color space (that is how many colors are represented). With the now ancient Blu-ray this wasn’t an issue but now that we are moving to HDR with a wide gamut, you want Rec.709 at least and Rec 2020 is better. Of course,
- 10-bit color. Related to the above wider color range, today you mainly get 8-bit color, but with wider gamut, you need more bits, so encoding at 10-bits (what in the old days was called 24 bit RGB vs 30 bit RGB) is a big win.
- 4K vs well 4K. Ok, one confusing thing is that are two slightly different widths. 4K can mean a true 4096 pixels across or 3840 or so to match the 1920 across that is HD. A bit of a small detail but good to
