H265 ?

Hi guys

It's been at least 2 years that we hear about H265.

I was just curious, who are the actual people/companies working on that technology, and when are we going to see it mainstream and available in the main NLEs ? Do we know that ?

Just curious.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding

Usual expert groups. Note that components of the standard will not be available until next year.

FCP X doesn't support this right now but I don't see any problem. Virtually no cameras shoot that codec except the now-cancelled Samsung NX-1:

www.dtcreports.com/weeklyriff/2015/08/10...ing-camera-converts/

My documentary group has no immediate need to distribute HEVC since few viewers could watch it.

My 2015 iMac 27 can decode 4k HEVC and the competing VP9 right now; it took about 1/8th the CPU capacity; the NX-1 clip took about 40%. On a capable iMac or PC, you can also download and try playing these modest-size test clips:

4k VP9 (play in Chrome): www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?111...gle-VP9-4K-HD-Sample

4k H.265 (play in VLC) : x265.com/hevc-video-files/

4k H.265 from Samsung NX-1 (play in VLC): www.imaging-resource.com/news/2014/11/19...abs-available-for-do

HEVC is a lot harder to encode than decode. I just tested 4k H.265 encoding using Handbrake and it was very slow -- 4 to 8 frames/sec. It is apparently not using Quick Sync for this, and that's understandable -- Skylake is the first CPU with Quick Sync support for H.265. Apple was a leader on using Quick Sync for H.264 (Premiere still doesn't have it), so FCP X may have that sooner than later.

Broader commercial streaming H.265 is stuck in legal battle over copy protection. If not for this you could stream Netflix H.265-encoded 4k content to your PC or Mac right now:

www.techhive.com/article/2858474/why-you...-theyre-capable.html

The least-encumbered pathway to 4k distribution may be Youtube, since Google owns the VP9, the free open-source competitor to H.265.

Here is a detailed discussion and lecture about some of these issues with HEVC/H.265 titled "4K HEVC Video Is Years Away From Being a Streaming Reality":

www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editoria...-Reality-103530.aspx

We shoot in 4k almost exclusively now for the editing advantages, not for distribution. If we got some new camera that required H.265 and if FCP X didn't have direct support, we'd just transcode using whatever utilities were available. That is what the NX-1 owners did.

Sorry guys I forgot to thank you for the detailed explanations last time !

Adobe just released an update of Media Encoder and it now supports HEVC.

I think a few things should be mentioned:

next year, here in Europe while Soccer Championships, terrestial HD/DBVT-2 will be broadcasted, and uses h265. For 1080p. Or perhaps 720p… here in Germany, the public broadcasters prefer 720 as 'high def' ...

hisense, a Chinese manufacturer, announced lately 8k monitor for sale next year...

In the darker rims of the iNet, the first 'rips' of 4k content and netflix appeared lately.-

Die Grünen, a party in Germany, tests the promises of the actual goverment, about 'broadband internet', actual average speed here is +30mbps (don't live outside the cities!)

In Japan, they allready test 8k, and regular broadcasting services announced next year.


so, h265 is in use, 4k is in use, 8k is in use, broadband is reality (in some parts...), and finally DRM is more and more an issue.

finally:
h265 is not UHD.

OK, so what percentage of the general broadcast audience has a 4K TV to view that stuff on?

BenB wrote: OK, so what percentage of the general broadcast audience has a 4K TV to view that stuff on?

It is actually much more restricted than 4K TV. It is *only* the small subset of 4K TVs with built-in legal H265 decoding. It does not include computers and mobile devices which largely cannot receive H265 due to legal squabbles: www.techhive.com/article/2858474/why-you...-theyre-capable.html

Besides the legal issues, H265 playback on computers is difficult since the computational process is highly asymmetric in favor of the encode side. Decoding H265 is just hugely expensive so I'm very interested in what Adobe support entails. Some releases say only AME, but others say Premiere Pro CC now has H265 support "without having to transcode":
www.premierebro.com/blog/premiere-pro-cc-20151-release

Now *that* I'd like to see. Premiere CC on my top-spec 2015 iMac 27 cannot even handle smoothly 4k in H264 which is much easier to decode. FCP X is vastly faster at handling 4k H264, whether it can handle H265 or not.

BenB wrote: OK, so what percentage of the general broadcast audience has a 4K TV to view that stuff on?

<1%? :woohoo:

but according to sales-numbers in my lil' habitat Germany, UHD tellys meanwhile outnumbered 3D TVs (anyone remembering this flop?).

Same as the pixel-madness once with still cameras, "more is better". ultraHD is better than justHD. Any John Doe understands this marketing.

I guess for 'makers' more important is, to be future proof. If you can produce in 4k, use 4k. If you can produce 16k, produce 16k :silly:

And how broadcasters broadcasts shouldn't be 'our' problem.....

What I'm dreaming of (a 5k iMac goes into that direction), is a huge screen, where I can handle several 'outputs' simultaneously, a wall in my living room as 'screen', sort-of Minority Report control, ... ok, in 20y ... perhaps.-

And if someone replies "that's not the way you watch movies/the homeshopping chanel", no, for sure, But that's how a newspaper is designed, for more than a 100y: a huge area divided into several 'cells'.- plus Pinch 'n Zoom.

Larry's not happy

according to his latest article about h265 and AME, Mr Jordan declares HEVC not ready for primetime yet...:

larryjordan.com/articles/adobe-media-enc...ter&utm_medium=email

What confuses me (and Mr Jordan obviously too), that Adobe claims in some parts of its website, h265 IS supported, in others not. And, using a preset in AME, the resulting files are BIGGER than done with h264, so nix "high efficient".....

In my humble hobbyist perspective, it's not enough to yell "FIRST!", you have to deliver first too ...

One significant area of confusion is Adobe claim to have H265 support in the latest PP and AME CC 2015, and they also claim the eval versions (which Larry was apparently using) are full-featured.

This is not correct. The eval versions are generally full featured but due to licensing issues H265 support is not in the eval version of PP and I also don't see it in AME.

This is unfortunate since Adobe previously realized the problems caused by not including all codecs back in CS5, and committed to changing this going forward: forums.adobe.com/message/3804375#3804375

As it currently stands you have to buy (ie subscribe) to Adobe Creative Cloud if you want to evaluate H265 in Premiere or AME:

forums.adobe.com/message/8242809#8242809

HEVC is extremely compute-intensive to decode. It is a long-GOP codec so a normal GPU cannot significantly assist with this. Normally it would be difficult to smoothly edit. Even with H264, Premiere CC is much slower than FCPX on the same hardware. By slower I mean frame rate when fast forwarding through the timeline and lag time on JKL input. In my testing FCPX's FF frame rate on 4K H264 material is 10x to 20x faster than PP CC 2015, with both on the same 2015 iMac 27.

However I've seen some credible reports that PP users are successfully editing H265 on high-end (generally Windows) machines with very powerful video cards, e.g, nVidia GTX-980 ti.

Those cards support nVidia's NVENC API which harnesses dedicated decoding hardware on the video card, entirely separate from the GPU. It could be likened to an nVidia-proprietary version of Intel's Quick Sync. It is possible that Adobe is using NVENC in the latest PP and AME so the few people with those high-end video cards can get decent performance. It would be interesting to see them swap out a video card to a powerful non-NVENC model and see if performance drastically degrades on H265.

What that means for post-2013 iMac and New Mac Pro users (AMD only GPUs), I don't know. AMD has a similar dedicated decoding hardware on some cards, and their own API (VCE): developer.amd.com/community/blog/2014/02...o-coding-engine-vce/

I don't know if Apple intends to use this API in future versions of FCPX to facilitate editing H265. Skylake CPUs (2015 iMac) have enhanced Quick Sync with H265 support but Xeon doesn't have this.

Aside from the above hardware support items, there are numerous issues with H265 regarding intellectual property and licensing which will likely slow the deployment. It is possible that these will take several years to resolve, by which time hardware support will be more widespread. If there are too many problems with H265, the competing royalty-free VP9 codec could dominate.

joema wrote: // full quote //

thanks for sharing, and excellent written, btw
gives a superb overwiew …

… chimes the ol' "bag of hurt", doesn't it?

Karsten Schlüter wrote:

… chimes the ol' "bag of hurt", doesn't it?

I couldn't have said it better. My feelings exactly.