ITU Approves H.264 Video Standard Successor H.265

An anonymous reader writes "The H.265 codec standard, the successor of H.264, has been approved, promising support for 8k UHD and lower bandwidth, but the patent issues plaguing H.264 remain." Here's the announcement from the ITU. From the article: "Patents remain an important issue as it was with H.264, Google proposing WebM, a new codec standard based on VP8, back in 2010, one that would be royalties free. They also included it in Chrome, with the intent to replace H.264, but this attempt never materialized. Mozilla and Opera also included WebM in their browsers with the same purpose, but they never discarded H.264 because most of the video out there is coded with it. MPEG LA, the owner of a patent pool covering H.264, promised that H.264 internet videos delivered for free will be forever royalty free, but who knows what will happen with H.265? Will they request royalties for free content or not? It remains to be seen. In the meantime, H.264 remains the only codec with wide adoption, and H.265 will probably follow on its steps."

Mp3

[bstrobl]

Once a standard becomes good enough, people will hang on to it for a long long time. Why bother re-encoding a complete music library from mp3 even if vorbis/aac is clearly the superior codec? Apple has enough difficulties pushing aac through, and not many hardware producers are including vorbis support. I guess the same could be said for windows xp and desktop hardware.

Re:H.265 will gain traction in video conferencing

[MtViewGuy]

I also think that H.265 could find its way to satellite TV broadcasting, because its lower bandwidth requirements for 720p/1080i resolution video means they can add in more channels per satellite.

Re:H.265 will gain traction in video conferencing

[Luckyo]

First adaptation, as usual, will be by HQ rip groups and anime fansubbers. These people pride themselves in being on the cutting edge and implementing stuff that isn't implemented anywhere in hardware yet. They were the guys who moved from h.264 high profile to h.264 10 bit high profile when h.264 hardware support started to become prevalent. They were the ones who moved to h.264 when divx hardware support became prevalent. Etc.

Funnily enough, it was the same for h.264, divx/xvid and so on. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if many of the guys encoding that stuff actually work in the industry and use their "hobby" as a testbed for new encoding techniques and methods before they go to mass production.

Re:So who won?

[Divebus]

You're being very kind by saying WebM is "less effective" compared to H.264. I'd put it closer to "why in the hell would I want crummy looking compression unless I use at least twice the data rate?" This from someone who's livelihood partially comes from putting compressed streams on the Internet. WebM isn't good enough and just got lapped again.