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11th June 2013, 05:30 | #1 | Link | |
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H.265/HEVC specification released, any decoders/encoders in sight?
Hi, According to Wikipedia, the H.265/HEVC spec was released on 7 June 2013, which I found for free on ITU-T's website:
http://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-H.265-201304-I/en Now that HEVC has been officially finalized and released, corporations (ATEME, DivX, maybe not Google) will be jumping up and down to quickly put forth their own HEVC decoders and encoders. However, as history has shown, open-source software often beats proprietary software. Look at x264, OPUS, nothing has wider support than FFmpeg, and Linux servers are an industry standard. While on Wikipedia it says that many companies are now putting their feet forward in the HEVC market, does anyone have an estimation for free and open-source (BSD, (L)GPL, etc.) decoders or encoders? Note that X265 doesn't count, as it's most likely a "lite" version: Quote:
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11th June 2013, 14:57 | #2 | Link | |
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I can't comment on the rest of it, but
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H.264 is arguably even more ubiquitous than MPEG-2 ever hoped to be, so I'd wager it'll still take several years for HEVC to become the dominant format, and then you also have to factor in the amount of time it will take for those in the FOSS community to implement and optimize an encoder for it (that is, if development of rival formats like VP9 or Daala don't throw a wrench into the works), while it still has to compete with x264 being as long-mature as it is. In perspective, H.264's specs arrived in early 2003, and hdot264 appeared sometime afterward. x264 appeared some time in (late?) 2004, didn't start getting a lot of attention until 2005, and H.264 as a format didn't start dominating over MPEG-4 ASP or SP until 2007 or 2008 in tangible online distribution*. The almost wholesale transition of streaming media to H.264 from the variety of formats they were using before didn't really start to coalesce until what, 2009 or 2010? I'm not really sure when MPEG-2 and VC-1 use on Blu-ray started to drop off, but it was still somewhere in there. *take Apple and iTunes as examples: many/most of the trailers and music videos available through them prior to formally starting the iTunes Video Store were in either MPEG-4 SP (music videos) or Sorenson 3 (trailers). The Video Store explicitly moved its offered content to H.264, and it was around the same time that the trailers site both mostly moved to H.264 and started distributing 720p and 1080p versions. That's just one example (and probably the only one that matters, at least legally). There are of course going to be early adopters that like the bleeding edge, but you've got to contend with a lot more standalones and mobile devices that support H.264 and not HEVC, which will impact its rate of adoption in the short term. Active development on Xvid didn't start tapering off until it was in its twilight years, so unless there's just this tidal wave of adoption for HEVC, I'd say that H.264 as a format - and x264 as its premier encoder - still have at least a good 5 years before HEVC's rising level of dominance begins to seriously impact it, at which time the use case will shift more to legacy support for things like disc formats or using H.264 as the 'plays on almost anything and/or not-so-powerful machines' solution that MPEG-4 ASP still manages to hold onto. The 5-year point also is likely to mirror the shift to UHDTV or a new generation of Blu-ray, where HEVC will naturally have broad use. |
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11th June 2013, 22:33 | #3 | Link | |||||
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I can imagine HEVC starting to see practical use in 2014 and account for a majority of IP streams in 2016. I don't see H.264 being dominant in 2018 overall, but it will certainly still be widely used for popular devices and formats. Heck, MPEG-2 will still be significant in 2018. It'll be a heterogeneous era. But given the dominance of IP delivery by then, I don't see a variety of codecs as being a major problem. |
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12th June 2013, 07:17 | #6 | Link | |
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I can't imagine why HEVC wouldn't be used for 4K / 8K footage. Variable block sizes used in HEVC would mean 4K and 8K footage would look vastly superior when compared to H.264. Can somebody shed some light on this? |
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12th June 2013, 14:50 | #8 | Link |
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Maybe they just haven't made their interest public?
Also, even if they are working on an h265 implementation in the background, you can't be sure it will be free and/or open-source. The current main dev joined the existing open-source x264 project as a student IIRC, so he might now want to make more money with his experience. Of course getting an x264-grade implementation that is available through multiple licenses (one being open/free) would be awesome, but that's not for us to decide. |
12th June 2013, 15:19 | #9 | Link |
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Variable block sizes and blocks up to 64x64 (I think, correct me if I'm wrong) and other features give HEVC way more flexibility than H.264. If x264's methods are ported to HEVC then it won't be a state-of-the-art encoder because HEVC gives so much more freedom than H.264.
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15th June 2013, 03:21 | #13 | Link |
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HM is from the Fraunhofer institute IIRC (I downloaded mine from hhi.fraunhofer.de), and I don't expect Fraunhofer products to remain free as in freedom, at least for binaries. I'm not a license expert so if anyone can correct me on this topic then please do, but fdk-aac binaries are nonredistributable and Fraunhofer even went so far as to try to require distributers of MP3-format files to pay royalties. I'm not sure exactly if HM binaries are redistributable (I'd be thrilled if HM was as free as x264) and when I said "free and open-source" I mean as free as it gets as in x264, FFmpeg, or the Linux Kernel. If HM really is this free, then that's a bonus but to the best of my knowledge this is not the case.
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15th June 2013, 05:29 | #15 | Link | ||
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15th June 2013, 08:38 | #16 | Link |
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HM is a reference encoder, its not optimized much at all. Comparing it to x264 is rather pointless, if you want you can compare it to JM (the H264 reference encoder), but even that may not be a useful comparison, depending on implementation details.
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LAV Filters - open source ffmpeg based media splitter and decoders Last edited by nevcairiel; 15th June 2013 at 08:41. |
15th June 2013, 14:15 | #17 | Link | |
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Specifically, it's under the 3-clause BSD. Right from the code itself:
http://hevc.kw.bbc.co.uk/svn/jctvc-a124/trunk/COPYING Quote:
I'd be surprised if HM is actually faster, but if that's true, the development model it has may have affected that. Considering that it took upwards of 15 minutes to generate 360-some-frame, 848x480, 14-bit samples with JM, and that was on a Core i5 and only after breaking the video up into four separate pieces so it could be run in parallel. At that kind of performance level, describing the speed as 'glacial' counts as a bit of a compliment. |
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19th June 2013, 09:01 | #18 | Link | |
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19th June 2013, 20:08 | #19 | Link | |
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All, bear in mind x264 devs have contributed x264 technologies and techniques to x262, xvid, and xvp8. In my experience with them, including DS, they are much more pragmatic than religious, and care more about making ever-better looking video than about any particular bitstream or feature. I would be startled if at least some core x264 contributors weren't already making plans around HEVC. And lots of the good things about x264 are quite applicable to HEVC. A lot could be done just by swapping out parts of the reference encoder with adapted x264 bits. It wouldn't be a fully optimized encoder, but it certainly wouldn't take years to have an encoder that reliably gives better quality than x264 at non-glacial encoding speeds. |
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21st June 2013, 02:26 | #20 | Link |
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I have moved the trolling and related discussion to this (closed) thread:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=168116 Please do not troll or feed trolls in this thread because at this point any followups to it here would likely violate rules 3, 4, 11, and/or 16. Thank you for your understanding. Last edited by Guest; 21st June 2013 at 02:34. |
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decoder, encoder, h.265, hevc, open-source |
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