[mythtv-users] H265 support

[Andre Newman]

On 11 Apr 2015, at 09:36, Mike Perkins <mikep at randomtraveller.org.uk> wrote:

> On 11/04/15 00:22, Michael Wisniewski wrote:
>> I really don't have any plans to use h265 for quite some time.  I really
>> doubt the cable companies are going to start using it since many of them
>> are still stuck on mpeg2.  I also can't see OTA changing that much too, but
>> I could be wrong.
>> 
>> I would guess since Myth is mostly for DVR type recordings, I don't think
>> it will be well supported.  Another guess is that most of the support for
>> h265 within myth would be done outside of myth with an external player.
>> Again, these are only guesses and speculations.
>> 
>> If you have a big library with h265, you might want to look at Kodi.  v14
>> has it built in (software decoding), and v15 nightlies has it for hardware
>> decoding (limited).
>> 
> Remember that mythtv is used in other places round the world than just the US. It is possible that some of those other places may begin carrying h265 before the US gets around to it. We'd like some support.

There are several Demo Channel satellite transmissions in Europe, two on 19E for the German market, one on Hotbird and recently one on 28E for the UK market, all but one of these are FTA. The encrypted one is used by Sky Germany, and is encrypted with a version of NDS3 so that one at least is unlikely to ever be able to work with MythTV.

These are transmitting UHD-0 format in h265 so HD colour space rec709, 8 or 10 bit, it varies even from transmission to transmission, standard dynamic range and 3840x2160 at 50 fps.

I have plenty of recordings including whole mux captures I can make available to anyone willing and able to work on this.

I would expect that the Cable companies will be the first to use h265 seriously, they have the biggest squeeze on capacity and full control over the broadcast chain with (usually) network supplied receivers.

I regularly work with a cable provider who mandates uncompressed feeds to their headend so they can have the best possible compression ratio. They have a lot of old copper networks so overall capacity is limited and they need to provide all the channels that satellite provides to compete, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them moving to h265 quite soon.

Andre