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HEVC (also known as h.265) - Review
#1
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/x265...,3565.html

Quote:Last month, the HEVC/H.265 standard was officially published. We recently got our hands on a pre-alpha build of x265, an HEVC encoder project from a company called MulticoreWare that's going to be licensed in much the same way as the famed x264 library.

How excited are you about this?

Space savings/quality improvements seem to be great. I could cut a 10TB library down to 6TB with this standard supposedly. Even better, it'd be easier to stream files as they'd be much smaller now. This would also mean videostreams/other streams on the internet will be easier to stream.

What do ya'll think of this?

Mod edit: XBMC does not support the HEVC standard at this moment. More information about this here: HEVC (wiki)
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#2
Crap. No HW decoder supports it, None, zero, nappa. This means back to high powered and noisy boxes for SW decode. No thank you please.
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#3
Hardware support won't take long; several of the new SoC's from NVidia, QUALCOMM and AMD support it so I doubt it will take long before their graphics cards support it as well.
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#4
Hopefully hardware acceleration comes to current GPUs. But in saying that look how long it took for the scene to switch to x264, and even these days there are still xvid releases. Its going to be a while till its commonly used.

I haven't had time to read the review, but are there any samples available? Also, can xbmc, or any other common media application play these files?
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#5
(2013-07-29, 03:00)davilla Wrote: Crap. No HW decoder supports it, None, zero, nappa. This means back to high powered and noisy boxes for SW decode. No thank you please.

It's in early phases. It's not even out yet. When it's out, every new device will be able to decode it lol. You won't need a high powered box to watch any of that content.

In fact, with software decoding, a Qualcomm processor can play a video back at 30 fps,, 1080p with 50% utilization. FYI, that's your PHONE. So if your phone can play back x265 encodes with 50% utilization, I don't think you'd have to worry even if it was software decoding.

Now consider the fact that Qualcomm, and all other people have released new SoCs, that are 4x faster (Just look at Nexus 7 review vs last years Nexus 7) and I think your worries are a little over the top.
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#6
There's different levels/profiles. Qualcomm might be able to playback something in h.265, but it most likely won't playback using the profiles that most people will want to use, which will get the most out of small file sizes.

But yeah, I think it won't be too long for h.265 hardware decoding to be an option on the market. I am looking forward to h.265, but I do think it is fair to say that it won't be (and shouldn't be) the general go-to format for at least another year, if not more. Unless people just want to use it with their personal collections.

XBMC won't be able to play back h.265 until x265 is worked into ffmpeg, and then we update XBMC with that version of ffmpeg.

It's pretty amazing what this codec can do.
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#7
I like the idea of an improved codec and all it's benefits but I'm not going waste my time re-encoding my library that will lose some quality to save a few TB's I already have.
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#8
I'm no expert on CODECs - hell, I just watch this stuff, I don't write the algorithms! - but it seems to me that H.265 only really comes into play when you have ultra high-def streams, yes?

Given how much SD/MPEG-2 content there still is and the fact that we're only now really catching up with ubiquitous 1080 screens, it'll be some time before we're all ready to feel the benefit of 4k content. That in turn gives time for the libraries to filter through, code to be updated, and so on.

It's the future, sure, but I won't cash in my ION systems *just* yet... :-)
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#9
Nope. h.265 will dramatically decrease file sizes even for SD content, when compared to h.264. In some cases up to half the file size to achieve the same quality.

Both h.265 and h.264 are used in 4k.
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#10
I don't think it'll take long for H.265 to go mainstream, Samsung are already introducing decoders on their devices including high end TV's and the Galaxy S4.

There is a good explanation of H.265 @ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/11/...vc/?page=1
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#11
(2013-07-29, 03:00)davilla Wrote: Crap. No HW decoder supports it, None, zero, nappa. This means back to high powered and noisy boxes for SW decode. No thank you please.

what an absurd post, the thing is not even out yet and your already shooting it down with such a stupid post.
would of expected better from a dev.
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#12
(2013-07-29, 15:20)krish_2k4 Wrote:
(2013-07-29, 03:00)davilla Wrote: Crap. No HW decoder supports it, None, zero, nappa. This means back to high powered and noisy boxes for SW decode. No thank you please.

what an absurd post, the thing is not even out yet and your already shooting it down with such a stupid post.
would of expected better from a dev.

He's talking about jumping on the h.265 bandwagon before the market is ready for it, and he's right.
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#13
I have done some HEVC encoding and playback.

Software decoding is not too taxing up to 1080p. Its helped by the fact that the bitrates that people use will be relatively low. Main L4.0 has maxrate of 12Mbps and this is the profile and level that most people will use for encoding 1080p content. I expect 4-8Mbps will be the average bitrate used.

I have played 1080p 5Mbps HEVC on a slow dual core (eg G530) with less than 50% utilisation. Plus these are very early decoders, efficiency gains are possible.

In a couple of years time this kind of CPU power will be trivial. And hardware decoders will start to become available.

Obviously 4K is another thing entirely. I don't expect 4K to catch on in a big way to be honest, certainly not any time soon.
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#14
(2013-07-29, 16:41)voochi Wrote: I have done some HEVC encoding and playback.

Software decoding is not too taxing up to 1080p. Its helped by the fact that the bitrates that people use will be relatively low. Main L4.0 has maxrate of 12Mbps and this is the profile and level that most people will use for encoding 1080p content. I expect 4-8Mbps will be the average bitrate used.

I have played 1080p 5Mbps HEVC on a slow dual core (eg G530) with less than 50% utilisation. Plus these are very early decoders, efficiency gains are possible.

In a couple of years time this kind of CPU power will be trivial. And hardware decoders will start to become available.

Obviously 4K is another thing entirely. I don't expect 4K to catch on in a big way to be honest, certainly not any time soon.

Yup, exactly my point. Any modern day PC can play these files, even with software decoding.

If you actually read the review, rather than just skim it really quickly, you'll notice that many of the things that are in x264 that are improvements,, haven't yet been implemented yet into x265. This is a "preview review". The team is still hard at work at implementing further improvements that we already have in x264.

There have been vast improvements in x264 since it came out. HEVC was just finalized, and x265 reviews are just out. By the time people actually start using this standard on a large scale, we'll have seen vast improvements again.

To me though, the thing is with 50% compression rates, we can see people take advantage of this in new ways. New services, improved services, etc. So at least to me, it's exciting to see this progress so quickly now. I'm sure some people sitting on over 10TB of video are happy as well because eventually ( as encoders become more efficient), we can now cut our storage down, or increase the amount of files we have.
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#15
(2013-07-29, 15:20)krish_2k4 Wrote:
(2013-07-29, 03:00)davilla Wrote: Crap. No HW decoder supports it, None, zero, nappa. This means back to high powered and noisy boxes for SW decode. No thank you please.

what an absurd post, the thing is not even out yet and your already shooting it down with such a stupid post.
would of expected better from a dev.

This absurd xbmc dev happens to be an expert on hardware video decoding. I'm glad you find my post absurd, perhaps when I refuse to provide any code to handle h265, that will get your attention.

File size is NOT the only issue, if the video does not play on 80 percent of the XBMC platforms we support, then what you saved in file size becomes useless and unimportant.

Let's get real here, h265 is aimed at commercial usage to save on net bandwidth usage.
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HEVC (also known as h.265) - Review0