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LGPL H.265 Codec Implementation Available; Encoding To Come Later
New submitter Zyrill writes "The German company Stuttgarter Struktur AG has released a free and open source implementation of the H.265 codec, also termed 'High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC)' which is now available on Github. At the same video quality, H.265 promises roughly half the bitrate as compared to H.264. Also, resolutions up to 8K UHD (7680 × 4320 px) are supported. The software is licensed under LGPL. Quoting from the homepage where the software is also available for download: '[This software] is written from scratch in plain C for simplicity and efficiency. Its simple API makes it easy to integrate it into other software. Currently, libde265 only decodes intra frames, inter-frame decoding is under construction. Encoding is planned to be added afterwards.'"
If there's no encoding, isn't it just a dec?
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Presumably somebody out in the world currently has a non-open H.265 encoder. You're being obtuse even by AC standards.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
"I have never seen really stable frame-rates in video replay without hardware acceleration"
My only recommendation is to stop using substandard hardware or switch to a better software player.. I've been doing 1080p video rendering in software just fine using VLC since the days of my 2.4GHz P4 with a 64MB GeForce 2 and 2GB PC2700 DDR1.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
So far, the FSF promoted Ogg-Theora as the standard that they wanted to push as the liberated standard for video encoding & decoding. Since h.264 is more standardized, it's good that they have at least an FOSS equivalent of it - if it can decode existing h.264 encoded videos out there, it's off to a good start.
What I wonder is - if it's LGPL, how different is LGPL3 from GPL3? The FSF made radical changes in version 3, and made GPL3 almost unusable for anyone who wants to lock things in hardware. Is LGPL3 any looser in terms of allowing hardware locking of the code than GPL3? Also, Ogg Theora itself - is it GPL3?
Also, would the new standard be supportable under HTML5?
As long as you have an intermediary to transcode to a supported format, why is that a problem? Plex does a perfectly fine job right now delivering h.264 with AAC audio to less capable mobile devices that I own, as do a number of DLNA servers that are scattered around my apartment. Presumably if you're watching on a device with sub-optimal functionality, you're going to be less concerned about overall source fidelity in the first place; it's not like you care that you aren't getting the full bit rate and eight channel audio from your blu-ray sources when you're watching them on a 4" iThing screen with a $10 pair of headphones.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Decoding is simple, just implement the spec. Encoding is much more difficult, there is no spec - only a requirement that your encoded output can be decoded by a spec compliant decoder.
An open source library in the codec world is meaningless if the codec itself is covered by patents, because this means that no one can use the library in any country that enforces software patents. Last I saw H.265 is blanketed by over 500 patents. And in this case it's even worse than H.264 because they're not all held by one group, but by all kinds of different groups who all say they want royalties.
The other day Telestream announced the availability of an open source H.265 encoder via the x265.org site. Guess we don't have to wait for "Encoding to come later". See here: http://www.telestream.net/company/press/2013-09-03.htm
Let me know when I can slap a desktop class processor in my Nexus10 / netbook / other portable device that doesn't chug down battery like my i5 laptop ( that lasts maybe 5 hours doing light work @ 50% brightness ). And before you say anything about 1366x768 and down-scaling the N10 at least has a higher resolution than 1080P.
There are tons of devices out there that need to be able to hardware decode anything above 720P H.264. That is the same reason I absolutely hate that more an more video is being released in the 10bit H.264 format, supposedly for smaller file sizes without visual distortions. Especially by the idiots who way over bitrate their encodes, not only can very few devices hardware decode 10bit, but I can transcode to "shitty" xvid with smaller file sizes ( literally shaving off GBs of 1080P encodes) and no visual quality loss.
If you are going to encode with huge bitrate overages you might as well use 8bit that pretty much anyone and everyone nowadays can easily decode....
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
"Let me know when I can slap a desktop class processor in my Nexus10 / netbook / other portable device that doesn't chug down battery like my i5 laptop"
The processor in your Nexus 10 and netbook are likely already far more powerful than my old P4. The Atom D510 smashes the shit out of a 3.2GHz HT-Enabled P4 in 3DMark CPU Bench, and totally dominates in Sandra (excepting memory bandwidth test.)
Which means you should've been able to do 1080p stutter-free for AGES on CPU alone. Your software is the issue here, not your hardware.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Erm... you should have done more research (or know more about the field).
x265 is an encoder (open source one, even!), and it *does* support encoding the full way - intraframes + interframes (p,b). It's frame-threading is currently in the works along with lookahead - at the end of that, rate control should be there, hopefully. The development is pretty active - well, MCW has employees doing it actually, so duh :D
As fir decoding, naturally there is a libav/ffmpeg code for that, and it is also reasonably feature-complete. It should basically decode standard streams (intra+inter) pretty well. It however hasn't been merged - in august, there was a first call for that on the ML (http://lists.libav.org/pipermail/libav-devel/2013-August/049750.html), but as you can see, it was promptly ignored by the rest of the developers, who mostly prefer to indulge in rewriting some existing code, polishing cosmetics, and implementing 1-purpose game codecs from early 1990s that nobody really cares about :) (Okay, that was a troll - hello elenril o/ - but the factual parts of my posts were meant seriously).
That's because 'intellectual property' is a misnomer. Patents are a government handout, and entirely a creation BY THE STATE. They are taxing the public in the form of freedom instead of money in hopes that we get a decent ROI in technological progress.
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My Galaxy Tab 7.7 is MUCH more convenient to use on a train/bus than a desktop/"normal PC" (and it plays regular 1080p H.264 files perfectly, thank you very much). More convenient than any laptop as well. Just because YOU have the time to sit in front of a desktop to watch a video doesn't mean that everyone has to do the same.
My media consumption is made either on my tablet or on my TV's internal H.264 player. I'll probably get a media player to replace the TV's player when its capabilities no longer suit me. Since 99% of all HD videos play perfectly there, I see no reason to waste money on a media player now to play that extra 1%; and there is no way I'll get a full PC on my living room. And most of the people I know are in a similar situation.
If you encode files in a way that nobody will care to decode, your work is useless.
Signed, a more experienced encoder than you.