>There is no simple answer to fix these 2 problems due to crf targets. Traditionally in x264 such scene will simply end up in blocking artifacts. x265 chooses t

>There is no simple answer to fix these 2 problems due to crf targets. Traditionally in x264 such scene will simply end up in blocking artifacts. x265 chooses to eliminate artifacts at the cost of detail loss. The down side is that even at lower crf targets it is tough to eliminate x265’s tendency to blur. To truly eliminate such effects, you will first need no-sao:no-strong-intra-smoothing:deblock=-1,-1 to make x265 behave more like x264, then raise psy-rd and psy-rdoq accordingly (2 and 5 respectively should do the trick). However, this reintroduces unpleasant artifacts x265 aimed to eliminate in the first place, thus I do not recommend such encode parameters unless encoding crf <16 (in which case file sizes are so big just use x264, why even bother x265?). There might be something to be said for perceptible degradation: the characteristic macroblock vomit produced by bit-starvation gives a sure signal to the viewer that something went wrong with the video encoding, whereas a smooth looking image with some details omitted can produce a false impression of what the video signal is, with no indication as to whether or not this is taking place (imagine this happening, for example in security camera footage).