Next-Gen Video Encoding: x265 Tackles HEVC/H.265 104
An anonymous reader writes "Late last night, MulticoreWare released an early alpha build of the x265 library. x265 is intended to be the open source counterpart to the recently released HEVC/H.265 standard which was approved back in January, much in the same way that x264 is used for H.264 today. Tom's Hardware put x265 through a series of CPU benchmarks and then compared x265 to x264. While x265 is more taxing in terms of CPU utilization, it affords higher quality at any given bit rate, or the same quality at a lower bit rate than x264."
(Reader Dputiger writes points out a comparison at ExtremeTech, too.)
This is great news! (Score:5, Interesting)
25-35% less file size for the same quality is an incredible advance. Obviously the task of improving compression algorithms is going to ratchet up enormously as the file sizes get smaller with higher entropy. I'm in fact amazed that an advance this big is even possible, apparently, x264 is nowhere near the theoretical limits for (lossy) video compression.
h264 good enough? (Score:2, Interesting)
The thing is h264 is maybe too entrenched, it took many years to have many millions of devices supporting it and that gives you a big install base that people don't necessarily want to replace (not everyone is the middle class american with "drawer full of smartphones"). And even then many old PCs aren't quite up to the task yet - the kind that barely manage youtube 480p or even 360p.
MP3 files are still commonly used, even though they're clearly inferior and using AAC or OGG is a comparatively much simpler problem. I still even watch a lot of xvid. I can imagine the market will stick to h264 for a long time, like Windows XP stuck and still sticks around. Even if h265 is adopted it will mean content providers and hosts will have to dual encode to h264 and h265 for everything, increasing storage and encoding hardware costs.