VA-API Adds HEVC H.265 Decode API

[phoronix]

Phoronix: VA-API Adds HEVC H.265 Decode API

Intel developers have added the necessary code for the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) to offer support for decoding H.265/HEVC content...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTg1MzU

[birdie]

HEVC isn't widely popular with Linux users as most prefer alternatives like VP9 and other open-source-friendly formats

Speak for yourself, Michael. Can you tell us how many Linux users encode at all? I guess it's less than 1%. And out of this percent, can you tell us what codecs people prefer? I've never seen a single poll on that matter. Open Source codecs? I don't care about VP8/VP9 at all as both still don't have viable encoders and widely implemented hardware decoders.

People who encode and love to compress videos as much as possible almost always use the most advanced codecs.

HEVC's only problem right now is that the x265 encoder is significantly slower than x264 (in an order of magnitude or even more). Also, x265 is not mature enough and its gains over x264 are negligible (as opposed to what media says).

[hajj_3]

i'm very surprised to see this added so early, good job intel! Now about getting OpenGL 4.x finished... :P

[Kivada]

Speak for yourself, Michael. Can you tell us how many Linux users encode at all? I guess it's less than 1%. And out of this percent, can you tell us what codecs people prefer? I've never seen a single poll on that matter. Open Source codecs? I don't care about VP8/VP9 at all as both still don't have viable encoders and widely implemented hardware decoders.

People who encode and love to compress videos as much as possible almost always use the most advanced codecs.

HEVC's only problem right now is that the x265 encoder is significantly slower than x264 (in an order of magnitude or even more). Also, x265 is not mature enough and its gains over x264 are negligible (as opposed to what media says).

Plenty of VP9 and H.265 content on Youtube already, most videos have already had their 720p~4K videos already re-transcodedm just install Flashgot on Firefox to see all of the version of each video that are availible. Theres usually at least 2 codec versions in each quality grade a video is availible in.

[My8th]

Plenty of VP9 and H.265 content on Youtube already, most videos have already had their 720p~4K videos already re-transcodedm just install Flashgot on Firefox to see all of the version of each video that are availible. Theres usually at least 2 codec versions in each quality grade a video is availible in.

I don't think H.265 is used, only H.264 and VP9.

[Kivada]

I don't think H.265 is used, only H.264 and VP9.

I'd guess that h.265 is in use due to the fact that I couldn't even get a thumbnail ouf of the 1080p .mp4 files, let alone play them about the same time the .webm 1080p files started not having audio in Totem/Xine and throwing an unsupported codec VP90 error in VLC, till I upgraded my codecs/players.

[brad0]

I'd guess that h.265 is in use due to the fact that I couldn't even get a thumbnail ouf of the 1080p .mp4 files, let alone play them about the same time the .webm 1080p files started not having audio in Totem/Xine and throwing an unsupported codec VP90 error in VLC, till I upgraded my codecs/players.

I'm a little skeptical YouTube would be using H.265 already except for maybe 4K content.

[smitty3268]

I'd guess that h.265 is in use due to the fact that I couldn't even get a thumbnail ouf of the 1080p .mp4 files, let alone play them about the same time the .webm 1080p files started not having audio in Totem/Xine and throwing an unsupported codec VP90 error in VLC, till I upgraded my codecs/players.

Youtube is not using any h.265 at all, and they haven't announced any plans of doing so.

They are currently using VP9 for all 4k content, and of course they have h.264 support for everything.

[Forge]

Also, x265 is not mature enough and its gains over x264 are negligible (as opposed to what media says).

Your statement is too broad. I've been archiving my newest encodes in h264 and h265 both, my h265 encodes for a given perceived quality are generally 1/4 to 1/10 the size of the same material in h264.

Most recently, about three hours of Christmas morning, in 1080p lossless source, was a bit over 400GB untouched. My first gen x264 rough encode at very high bitrate was about 60GB. The final edit of the MPEG2 source was then encoded via x264 to 15GB, the x265 version, from the same source with no visible differences in the output, was 3GB.

If there were h265 hardware encoders around, I'd be seriously looking into h265 as my default format. Instead, I'm still making h264 encodes and making h265 encodes for 'someday'.