Available HEVC/H.265 test encoders

[JEEB]

Whoops, seemingly didn't notice at all that HM 12.0 got released during the last two weeks. Not sure if there was an e-mail on the JCT-VC regarding it. In any case, 32bit Windows binaries of the decoder and encoder are available here (configuration file folder included).

[filler56789]

Thanks a lot, JEEB

[xooyoozoo]

"Rovi Launches DivX 10" with HEVC decode/encode. The download link doesn't seem to be live yet?

[JEEB]

Originally Posted by xooyoozoo

"Rovi Launches DivX 10" with HEVC decode/encode. The download link doesn't seem to be live yet?

If you check the installer you get here, you will already get a DivX 10 installer, which also seems to contain the HEVC plugin.

In other words, it indeed seems to be out

Too bad they're using their ad-hoc HEVC-in-Matroska thing specified here. Matroska-devel more or less decided to wait for 14496-15 AMD2 (HEVC FF) to copy the extradata off of. And that still hasn't been pushed out for the last ballot :/ . Last I heard there really weren't any changes done to it for like over a month or so, either. It's just not being pushed out :s .

[fumoffu]

Thanks for the heads up. I'm testing it now. First thing I noticed is that the encoder uses only about 160MB of RAM (I'm re-encoding 720p wmv clip), which is pretty low and I'm not sure if this is a good sign... I'm guessing it must be using Wavefront Parallel Processing? Speed wise it's similar to Strongene encoder, and uses 90% of the CPU (4 cores), with rather small fluctuations. Quality - don't know I'm waiting for output...

Edit:
Quality is ok but I don't have time now to do serious x264 or Strongene HEVC comparison.
But the funny thing is that DivX player apparently needs over 800MB RAM for 720p playback... Memory leak? Bad optimization? Large decoder buffer? Might be the last one because CPU usage fluctuates between 0-10% (on 4 core i5 @4GHz).

[xooyoozoo]

Spent some time with the divx converter and its 'HEVC 1080p' preset on the astronaut Crew and Soccer clips. Note that the HEVC-MKV demuxer JEEB linked to only works when you compile it yourself. Currently, the prebuilt binary complains with divx's output.

There's definitely scene detection, though the detection is a bit too enthusiastic on the Crew clip. Keyints are at 5 secs, and the frame cadence resembles IBBBP (w/ fewer Bs when necessary). They also seem to have limited CTU size to 32x32, but that maybe that's automatic based on source resolution. At lower bitrates, the image sometimes has distinct block edges, which suggest they tweaked the loop filters.

Encoding speed is roughly half that of x264-veryslow. I wasn't impressed at all by visual quality, but I'll try testing the encoder with more clips some time later.