(Pic not related)
Remember the transition from XviD to h264? Well, soon, 10-bit h264 will replace 8-bit h264.
Advantages
Without going into encoder speak, 10-bit h264 can achieve a same level of quality as 8-bit h264, but at a lower filesize.
Disadvantages
10-bit h264 is not widely supported yet.
More info on 10-bit h264 | More | More
This is simply a discussion your opinions of 10-bit h264.
Tuesday 19th July 2011 
10:28 PM 
A lot groups imply that software decoding for 10bit is not an issue. However, if you want to stream a 720p hi10p video from a linux box to a ps3 (transcoding), it will practically kill most computers. I haven’t bothered to test 1080p hi10p, given the results with 720p hi10p. Unless hardware rendering updates, watching anime content on our shiny HDTVs is now going to be increasingly difficult.
Computer Setup:
i7-930, 20gigs 1333mhz ram, etc
P.S.
This computer is used for work/play. It can crunch really large data sets in matlab better than it can software transcode hi10p.
>i7-930
it’s a kind of funny that many people said that their i7 was struggling with hi10p XD
Local playback is generally fine, except some action sequences can use 100% cpu on a single core. The biggest issue with transcoding is that mencoder is just extremely out dated and not really maintained. This is beside the fact it took a few hours to get hi10p transcoding to work on ubuntu 10.04. Windows is clearly simpler, but dual booting is annoying. Although local playback for hi10p on ubuntu takes about 5-10 minutes of googling and finding the right ppa.
There’s this BLEEDING-EDGE, not-yet-widely-known technology known as HDMI/DVI… or, for technophobes, you can just plug a VGA cable into most TVs.
Anyone have or tested the new Western Digital TV live for 10bit compatibility? I seems to have been released sometime in October?
The answer is no, http://community.wdc.com/t5/WD-TV-Live-Firmware/10-bits-color-depth-support-for-WDTV-live/td-p/236512
Hi10p dose not work on Western Digital TV live, i’ve tried it on my wd live and it’s a no go.. so bottom line is Hi10p is useless to me, i dont see any difference anyway well apart from file size which dosent matter..
the other alternative is to reconvert it to 8bit or to blu-ray if you have a bd burner, or skip hi-10p
Then just re-encode it if you want to watch it on your tv or pc. It doesn’t bother me re-encoding an already good source.
I don’t think we need 10 bit or 1920×1080 anime anyway ’cause 1280×720 is good enough. And most of us here, I think, use laptop or average size TV to watch them. Plus when we watch anime, it’s not like we gonna stick our faces to the screen and check every single detail of the video, right? We just need the video to be HD(high definition) or BD(blu-ray), clear detail, not delayed, and good color.
Did u realize that this kind of discussion was outdated?
and
>we
We? Most of us? nope. 1080p will be better for most ppl here. that’s why u can find so much bluray release here.
I know this is an old discussion, but I’m just realizing now why some of the H264s I’ve been downloading lately look like crap, so FWIW:
It seems Hi10p 1080p is not supported by video cards, and most CPUs chug when trying to decode it. My i5 would almost surely suck at it, and I’m not about to buy a new PC just to play anime – for any other application I have to throw everything I have at it just to utilize 80% of it. Even if I could play it on my desktop, it would ONLY be for the desktop. Why would I want that when I can play HD video on my laptop too as long as it’s NOT 10-bit?
The software support is also awful. ffdshow may not have bleeding edge codec support, but the additional features it allows put it at least a decade past other codecs. Most Hi10p playback guides start with completely removing it… then installing a bunch of other stuff and meticulously configuring it. That would be like uninstalling Windows 7 and going back to 3.11, with shades of building my own Gentoo Linux installation – just to play anime, as if it’s the only kind of video there is.
Also, even the Blu-rays these groups are ripping use 8-bits per pixel, so 10bpp is like reencoding 128kbps MP3s at 256kbps – it may be hypothetically better than if you ripped it to 128 again, but it still won’t replace the lost quality of the source copy.
So what this ultimately means is that when I get a Hi10p video, it just looks like it was encoded at 500kbps – severe blocky banding and the overall color occasionally snaps brighter or darker. In some instances there’s even a severe effect that makes it look like keyframes are missing.
It may be the future of video encoding, and if a group wants to actually label their Hi10p releases, that’s fine. It is far from the present though and I’m avoiding anyone who only uses it. It’s even pretty assholish for groups like Commie to just switch to it with no indication in the filenames, so you waste all that time to download it only to find broken encodes.
I don’t know what’s wrong with ur i5, but it kinds of funny. Mine is only Dual-Core E5300 and I also downloading 1080p Hi10P, including the heavy bitrate one such as [Hiryuu] Dog Days, and I watched it like a boss.
also
>ffdshow
this was ur mistake in the first place. use LAV Filter
It’s not that I was defending about Hi10P development. It just that I tried to catch up with technology nowadays, since it become a standard today.
I don’t think ffdshow alone should be blamed for playback problems. I have both i5 and Core2Duo machines that play BD 1080p videos, and I can watch them on both even while I’m encoding some 720p video.
For me as one of the downloaders, any of the two format is fine. And in case I prefer 8bit over 10bit(hypothetically speaking) then my best choice is re-encoding it as a temporary solution, unless the fansub group is willing to release 2 version/have alternative 720p 8bit versions.
Maybe u mean about this post?
>http://doki.co/2012/06/24/updated-h264hi10p-policy/comment-page-1/#comment-37467
I was referring that it was ffdshow that should be blamed for dithering 10bit to 8bit, not playback issue
┐(´д｀)┌
Yeah my bad. That’s the real issue as of now, hardware support for 10bit playback. 8bit is never outdated BTW, and never a wrong choice to release anything in 8-bit. Like said earlier, even the BD releases are in 8-bit, and converting the trustream to 10-bit is just a preference AFAIK.
Fair enough ◕ ◡ ◕
During the transition it is always best to provide the 2 versions, I like the better banding of 10bit but not at this cost. More taking into consideration that many people now use any compatible player to view video on TV from 32″ to 70″ or bigger TV reclining on a couch or bed.
It’s easy to do both versions during the time of the encoding before the release of the episode or movie.
I remember having to encode many h264 to xvid at first to watch them on TV instead of sitting right in front of a 23″ monitor, and a 20″ before and smaller before. Now I’ve been watching videos at a 50″ and 60″ TV that as well as the blueray player for older TV effortlessly reproduce more than 80% of what is available on the net. Not to mention that I usually look for what can be played on them before dowloading it.
Why would I want to buy another 60″ TV only to be able to play 10bit video. I will not spend 2000.00 buks again in a TV for that. Now I only has too copy the 8bit h264 files at a USB and see then at 1080p.
I agree with the development, but not trying to do it by force as the companies do to sell products, we can say that the community does not need to do that.
Besides that please just try to make the smaller files as possible. I have seen files of 400mb or 500mb or even less (300mb) in 1080p who are equal to or better than others of 700mb or 1gb, either aac or ac3 (I have no problema with mp3 neither) with hard or soft subtitles. Just do that always in avi, mp4 or mkv.