Rarbg X265 Encoding Settings May 2026

RARBG used a modified version of the x265 encoder. While they tweaked settings over the years, the core parameters generally looked like this:

The Good:

The Bad:

No discussion of RARBG x265 settings is complete without addressing audio. They almost never used DTS or TrueHD. Their standard was AAC 5.1 at 384kbps or Opus at 192kbps.

| Flag | Value | RARBG Reasoning | | :--- | :--- | :--- | | -preset | medium | Slower than fast, but yields 15% better compression. Slow was too time-consuming for mass encoding. | | -crf | 19 | The "golden value." 18 is visually lossless but larger; 20 shows slight macroblocking in dark scenes. 19 was the compromise. | | aq-mode | 3 | Adaptive Quantization mode 3 (Auto-Variance). Essential for preserving detail in dark areas (a weakness of early x265). | | aq-strength | 1.0 | Mild. Stronger values (1.4) flatten texture. RARBG kept it moderate to retain face details. | | no-sao | 1 | Disables Sample Adaptive Offset. Controversial: SAO smooths artifacts but blurs edges. RARBG turned it off to keep sharpness. | | deblock | -2,-2 | Aggressive deblocking filter. Removes blocking artifacts but can soften fine detail. This gave RARBG encodes their "clean" look. | | rskip | 2 | Early CU size decision. Speeds up encoding by 40% with minimal quality loss—essential for their workflow. | Rarbg X265 Encoding Settings

Below are the typical categories and values you’ll encounter in a RARBG x265 encode and why they’re chosen.

  • Preset (e.g., medium, slow, slower)
  • Tune (e.g., film, animation, grain)
  • CRF vs. bitrate
  • CRF values commonly used
  • Profile & level (main, main10)
  • Color matrix, transfer, and range
  • Adaptive B-frames, reference frames, and partitions
  • Deblocking and SAO (sample adaptive offset)
  • Psycho-visual tuning and RDO (rate-distortion optimization)

    • If you were a movie buff or a data hoarder between 2014 and 2023, you knew the name RARBG. Before its untimely shutdown in 2023, RARBG was the gold standard for scene releases. While other groups focused on raw file size, RARBG focused on the magic of compression. RARBG used a modified version of the x265 encoder

    Specifically, their x265 (HEVC) releases became the benchmark for quality-to-size ratio.

    But what was actually happening under the hood? Now that the site is gone, let’s reverse-engineer the settings that made a 1.5GB RARBG rip look better than a 4GB release from competitors. The Bad: No discussion of RARBG x265 settings

    Deblocking smooths out the jagged edges around objects. The default is 0:0. RARBG went slightly negative (-1:-1). This tells the encoder: "Do less smoothing." The result is a sharper, crisper image that feels less "processed."