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(2014-09-01, 08:05)nickr Wrote: For 1080p I am not sure it is going to be be that important anyway. (And incidentally I read that there is no particular advantage to HEVC at 1080p).
Quote:To begin, Kodi has been updated to use FFmpeg 2.2.4. For users, this means Kodi will now be capable of playing back h.265 (also known as HEVC) and VP9 video codecs. This could result in dramatically smaller video files sizes with exactly the same level of quality. A 40 GB file could be compressed to 20 GB. A 1 GB file could be compressed to 500 MB without any loss in perceivable quality. Users with particularly large libraries or interest in 4K video may be especially likely to appreciate this update.
http://xbmc.org/kodi-14-0-helix-alpha-2/
I would say, with those amounts of compression possible, people would love it for their 1080p material as well.
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nickr
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2014-09-01, 09:53
(This post was last modified: 2014-09-01, 09:54 by nickr.)
I have read so much and finding the pages again can be difficult. However the post I was thinking of (not on this forum) referred to testing that showed the advantages of HEVC climbed as frame size increased. i.e. at SD frame sizes the savings were pretty small in percentage terms, at 720p a bit better, at 1080p better again, but it came into it's own at 4K.
The other issue is that of course if you re-encode your existing h.264 material you will lose quality - you cannot increase it. Those who bother with 1080p material (as opposed to, say, 720p) are likely to be interested in quality and are unlikely to tolerate any reduction in quality from re-encoding.
For new material, the ability to encode from, say, bluray quality to HEVC is likely to be attractive. Where we are going to get 4K material from, I just don't know.
However the thought that you can take your existing library and halve its size by encoding to HEVC without any loss of quality is fiction.
I agree it will become the new standard, just as h.264 has. I am certainly glad my 720p/1080p material is not stored as divx. In a few years I'll be glad my hidef material is HEVC. However I won't be converting from h264-->hevc. That would be stupid.
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(2014-09-01, 09:53)nickr Wrote: I agree it will become the new standard, just as h.264 has. I am certainly glad my 720p/1080p material is not stored as divx. In a few years I'll be glad my hidef material is HEVC. However I won't be converting from h264-->hevc. That would be stupid.
Agree!
BTW: Still interested to read that document you described.
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nickr
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If i find it, I'll post back here.
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Right now you need pretty powerful hardware to play H.265
If you all want to test for yourself, grab handbrake nightly
encode the same material in H.264 and in H.265 with identical setting
I do all my re encoding with the Regular High profile setting just change RF to 25 and just one audio stream with auto pass through.
you will notice 4 times the encoding time nearly half in size, since it is just the video part what gets compressed more, the audio part stays the same
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un1versal
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For e.g my atom d2550 and 330 both managed to play a 1080p HEVC low/elementary profile without issues (using current Helix code). but when cranking up the profiles then it goes out the window. I would hardly consider any atoms like that powerful hardware, so I guess depends on what the encodes are like.