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

Posted by timothy on 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.'"

8 of 141 comments (clear)

  1. Codec? by Hatta · · Score: 5, Funny

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

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    1. Re:Codec? by Sulik · · 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 · · 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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  2. Re:chicken and the egg problem? by slaker · · 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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  3. Patents. by brunes69 · · 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 · · 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.

  4. open source H.265 (HEVC) encoder by WestonFire22 · · 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

  5. Re:x265? by Anonymous Coward · · 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).