Intel Discontinues High-Speed, Open-Source H.265/HEVC Encoder Project

As part of Intel's Scalable Video Technology (SVT) initiative they had been developing SVT-HEVC as a BSD-licensed high performance H.265/HEVC video encoder optimized for Xeon Scalable and Xeon D processors. But recently they've changed course and the project has been officially discontinued.

With the new release of SVT-AV1 2.2, I was curious about SVT-HEVC in not seeing any new releases in quite some time... It turns out, Intel has officially ended SVT-HEVC. The SVT-AV1 project a while ago was already punted to the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) project and one of its lead maintainers having joined Meta from Intel two years ago. SVT-AV1 continues excelling great outside the borders of Intel but SVT-HEVC (and SVT-VP9) have remained Intel open-source projects but at least officially SVT-HEVC has ended.

SVT-HEVC hadn't seen a new release since 2021 and there are already several great open-source H.265 encoders out there like x265 and Kvazaar. But as of a few weeks ago, SVT-HEVC upstream is now discontinued. The GitHub repository was put into a read-only state and the discontinuation notice reads:

"DISCONTINUATION OF PROJECT

This project will no longer be maintained by Intel.

Intel has ceased development and contributions including, but not limited to, maintenance, bug fixes, new releases, or updates, to this project.

Intel no longer accepts patches to this project.

If you have an ongoing need to use this project, are interested in independently developing it, or would like to maintain patches for the open source software community, please create your own fork of this project."

But as mentioned with other great alternatives like x265 and Kvazaar out there, this is likely the end of SVT-HEVC although it did perform excellent on Intel Xeon servers -- as well as AMD EPYC and other x86_64 hardware.

Meanwhile SVT-VP9 doesn't have any discontinuation notice at this time. The SVT-VP9 GitHub repository remains under Intel's Open Visual Cloud account although it hasn't seen any new commits in four months and the last tagged release was back in 2020.