People get really excited about this revolutionary "quality based" encoding and to me it just sounds like -crf in x264. For trying to hit a constant bitrate, I'

People get really excited about this revolutionary "quality based" encoding and to me it just sounds like -crf in x264. For trying to hit a constant bitrate, I've heard of people performing a -crf pass, then taking the average bitrate of the result and using that for a constant quality encode. With this method, you let the encoder figure out the bitrate for the quality target you want to hit, then you can use that bitrate in a constant quality encode if you like.