Cinx and a “Bit” of Confusion

Cinx is the exact same program as Cin. The X (x) represents the roman numeral 10 for 10-bit as opposed to 8-bit standard. The third-party library used for x265 must be specially compiled with –bit-depth=10 in order to produce 10-bit rendered output. A cinx version can be built for most other distros if rendering at 10-bit is desirable instead of 8-bit. This build will not be able to output 8-bit depth which means you have to retain the Cin version also. Whatever build ffmpeg is linked to will determine what bit depth it can output. This is why there have to be separate builds. If you install both packages, Cin and CinX, you may get file conflicts of same file name — just continue.

Keep in mind that the regular 8-bit version works on 8-bit bytes — the standard word size for computers, but the 10-bit version has to use 2 words to contain all 10 bits so you can expect rendering to be as much as twice as slow. There is also a 12-bit version for consideration but currently the results are simply the same as 10-bit with padding to make 12-bit so it is of no value.