LGPL H.265 Codec Implementation Available; Encoding To Come Later 141
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.'"
Re:Hardware acceleration? (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.
Patents. (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.
open source H.265 (HEVC) encoder (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hardware acceleration? (Score:3, Interesting)
"Let me know when I can slap a desktop class processor in my Nexus10 / netbook / other portable device that doesn't chug down battery like my i5 laptop"
The processor in your Nexus 10 and netbook are likely already far more powerful than my old P4. The Atom D510 smashes the shit out of a 3.2GHz HT-Enabled P4 in 3DMark CPU Bench, and totally dominates in Sandra (excepting memory bandwidth test.)
Which means you should've been able to do 1080p stutter-free for AGES on CPU alone. Your software is the issue here, not your hardware.
Re:x265? (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).
Re:Patents. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
This is why New Zealand is region code 4, but pretty much all the content is region code 1. You've been sent to "we can't enforce software patents on you so you don't get content until after everyone else has paid for it" Coventry. It's also why the same content costs more there: out of spite, by the content production companies.