[mythtv-users] H265 support

[Andre Newman]

On 12 Apr 2015, at 03:05, Stephen Worthington <stephen_agent at jsw.gen.nz> wrote:

> On Sat, 11 Apr 2015 15:45:43 -0500, you wrote:
> 
>> I'm still not totally convinced that h265 will take over h264, but who
>> knows.  And even looking up h.264 licensing, it sounds like you still might
>> have to pay some usage fees to somebody if you're a big business and not an
>> end user.
> 
> It will as soon as 4K video becomes prevalent.  H.264 is insufficient
> for 4K - it can IIRC encode a 4K size frame, but only just and the bit
> rate it too high.

I see interest in reducing bit rate from everywhere, even Satellite providers who generally have a lot of unused capacity, often even unused capacity that they have paid for an choose not to use, most odd. There’s interest from SD to UHD.

The usual industry practice is there is a significant royalty on encoders and a much lesser royalty on decoders in STBs TVs etc. It’s quite common in sports contribution to use jpeg2000 for the lesser encoder cost which is significant due to h264 royalty. Of course jpeg2000 requires much more bandwidth than h264 but over fiber that’s often available quite cheaply, cheaper than a h264 encoder anyway.

I must look in to what the Open Broadcast Encoder guys do for licensing, their code is on github I believe and their h264 encoder is dramatically cheaper than anyone else’s.


As I replied to JYA originally I’m not seeing any interest anywhere in anything other than h265, I’ve never seen or heard any mention of vp9 or any of the other alternative codecs at any trade show or any customer. Most know what hevc or h265 is or at least heard of it. Of course the Internet streaming guys may well eat all the broadcasters lunch but in all the tests I’ve conducted every one of the alternative codecs has had some fundamental flaw or other than no broadcast engineer would accept, every time h264 has produced the best results. I haven’t yet done any serious trials that include h265 beyond the UHD stuff and I’ve not been involved in the encoding for those.

It’s coming, slowly but it’s coming ignore at your peril :-) 

Kodi has quite reasonable playback support now and performance is quite impressive, tvheadend happily records h265 channels in passthrough, they added support over a year ago, it doesn’t stream or record mkv but it’s quite usable as a recorder.

Andre