Highly compressed without losing quality, is impossible.
Most video encoders like h264 and h265 are lossy compressor(by default), they discards the data depends on the settings.

Noise only appear if the video decoder does not have deblocking filter, like the ealier MPEG1/2 and MPEG4-ASP (aka DivX/Xvid)

H264 and H265 are enabled by default, so the lower the bit rate, the blurrier the video.
And if the deblocking filter disabled you will see a lot of macroblock artifacts or the video simply looks distorted.

The quality degradation is there, just barely noticeable. But i guess Anime source is fine since your priority is to reduce the file size.
DVD-R/W already a lot of cheaper isn't it?

Puny desktop CPU cant really do much, eg Quad core CPU, which only have 2 cores for decoding, and 2 cores for encoding.
Unless the transcoder software support GPU assisted encoding and decoding.
Not to mention it just 8 bit, 10 bit encoding are much slower.

https://forum.lowyat.net/user/Anime4000

Standard accepted does not mean it's already widespread used.
Most decoder and GPU already support h264 decoding, while currently only Nvidia support 4K h264 GPU assisted decoding.
for Encoding, we gotta wait for a while. But GPU assisted encoding usually have lower quality.

Just look at his sig, it's the same person i think.

It's true that more instruction set the better, but x264 encoding speed is somehow depends at the compile times.
Like what compiler used, or what library included during compiling h264 source.

ICL(Intel C Compiler) compiled x264 encoder usually are optimized for Intel CPU thus have dramatical difference.
And it's much faster compare to GCC compiled x264.

Yeah GPU assisted encoder are faster because they're more simpler, but x264 can beat most of them even with the default quality settings.

This post has been edited by 1024kbps: Nov 18 2014, 09:59 PM