What encoding and bitrate should I use

[Gary Windfeild]

I am setting up a server and I am wondering what encoder and bitrate I should use. I thought I would use h.264 but then I read h.265/HEVC is more efficient. If I want to have better quality at the same itrate which one should I use. I also thought I would use a bitrate of 120mbit/s (15MB/s) but I am hearing most 4K movies dont even go up to that bitrate.

Thank you.

[TheDreadPirate]

Whooooaaa.  4K HDR10 straight off the disc is somewhere around 70-75Mbps using HEVC.  You could probably recompress that and get near original quality at a lower bit rate.  I get very close to original quality 1080p SDR with 10-11Mbps HEVC.  This results in a 60-70% file size reduction from what I ripped from the bluray.

120Mbps is way out there.  That's 8K territory.

What do you intend to encode with?  CPU?  GPU?

[Gary Windfeild]

I have a Core i3-8100 and rtx 1050ti in my server, it was my old gaming pc but I have since upgraded. I was hoping to sell the 1050ti but that would greatly reduce my ability to transcode so I probably going to keep it.

[TheDreadPirate]

Depending on the codecs, resolution, and number of users, you could probably get by with just the i3-8100 for transcoding. I have a less powerful Intel J4205 and can transcode 5-6 1080p HEVC streams.

But, if you intend to re-compress whatever media you have/will have to save space, maybe keep the 1050? The 10 series supports encoding in HEVC 10-bit. I still use my old GTX 1070 in a secondary PC for re-encoding the blurays and DVDs I rip. The HEVC encoder in my much newer RX 6800 is not as good.....

But, if you have a Nvidia GPU in your main PC, and don't mind tying up your PC to re-encode (if you intend to do that), again you could easily just use the i3-8100.

How many users do you intend to serve?