LGPL H.265 Codec Implementation Available; Encoding To Come Later

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LGPL H.265 Codec Implementation Available; Encoding To Come Later

Posted by timothy on Thursday September 5, 2013 @03:31AM from the fewer-bits-more-pixels dept.

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.'"

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Codec? by Hatta · 2013-09-05 03:37 · Score: 5, Funny

If there's no encoding, isn't it just a dec?

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1. Re:Codec? by Sulik · 2013-09-05 04:33 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Since it's intra-frame only, it's not even a 'dec' -> maybe just a 'duh'
  
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2. Re:Codec? by Alsee · 2013-09-05 05:00 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  It's not even that. The current version is basically just a glorified slideshow viewer.
  The way most video codecs work is they start by storing a full picture once every second or two. These are called key-frames, or intra-frames. The frames in between key-frames are called inter-frames, and this is where 90+% of the real work of a codec happens. These frames are stored as a short description of how the current frame is different than the last key-frame. Instead of storing the full picture you just describe what parts of the picture are moving, or if part of the picture is getting brighter or darker, or if colors are shifting.
  
  Currently, libde265 only decodes intra frames, inter-frame decoding is under construction.
  It's essentially a slideshow viewer, showing something akin to a series of JPEG pictures. Basically the entire CODEC is missing, the part that compresses and decompresses all the video frames in between.
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Re:chicken and the egg problem? by slaker · 2013-09-05 03:37 · Score: 5, Insightful

Presumably somebody out in the world currently has a non-open H.265 encoder. You're being obtuse even by AC standards.

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Re:Hardware acceleration? by Khyber · 2013-09-05 03:50 · Score: 4, Interesting

"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.

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Re:Soon new hardware will be necessary... by unixisc · 2013-09-05 03:52 · Score: 4, Informative

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?
Re:Soon new hardware will be necessary... by slaker · 2013-09-05 03:52 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

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Patents. by brunes69 · 2013-09-05 03:56 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.
1. Re:Patents. by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-05 04:11 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  You are wrong. It's not meaningless, because in the country where I live we don't have software patents. I understand how you may feel it's meaningless for you though but that doesn't mean that it's meaningless in general. Also, I believe that this is distributed in source form and thus is not violating any patents. This makes it even less meaningless.
2. Re:Patents. by Alsee · 2013-09-05 05:46 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  New Zealand is now one of those countries.
  No. The New Zealand bill was a scam, and all the news coverage screwed up and fell for the scam. The main body of the bill directly stated that software was not patentenable, but Supplementary Order Paper No 237 provided "clarification" that only software-as-such was not patentable, and further "clarified" that software-as-such ONLY included patent claims which merely added on-a-computer to something old. In legalese, they excluded patent claims who's sole contribution was that it was a program.
  
  10A Computer programs
  (1) A computer program is not an invention and not a manner of manufacture for the purposes of this Act.
  (2) Subsection (1) prevents anything from being an invention or a manner of manufacture for the purposes of this Act only to the extent that a claim in a patent or an application relates to a computer program as such.
  (3) A claim in a patent or an application relates to a computer program as such if the actual contribution made by the alleged invention lies solely in it being a computer program.
  
  This means the bill actually MANDATED pure software patents, so long as the patent claim described some new math or something.
  For example the classic pure-software patent catastrophe was the GIF patent... that patent claimed some new mathematics for converting one series of numbers (representing a picture) into a shorter series of numbers (a GIF compressed picture). The patent described (contributed) new mathematics, therefore the it's patentable. The RSA public-key crypto software patent is also still patentable, it claims new math for encrypting stuff. All audio and video codec patents, all patentable in New Zealand.
  The only patents they excluded was the stupidest level stuff like "fill out your tax form exactly the same way you filled it out last year, but I want a patent on doing it with software".
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open source H.265 (HEVC) encoder by WestonFire22 · 2013-09-05 04:21 · Score: 5, Interesting

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
Re:x265? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-09-05 05:38 · Score: 5, Interesting

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).