4K playback Direct Play Xbox one X

[KarlDag]

@jmckee

As long as the HEVC is direct streaming the HDR will be preserved.

I myself do not know the exact reasons h264 but my guess would be:

1. Compatibility: Almost every single modern device will have an h264 decoder that allows h264 play either direct streamed or transcoded. HEVC is still in that stage where now it is pretty common to have a decoder for it, but it can’t always handle being inside of a remuxed stream.

2. Processing power: A fair number servers will be able to transcode 1080p and pretty safely, but a lot of others will run into speed issues when it comes to 4K HEVC files.

Those are just my assumption on why hevc isn’t the default transcode target.

HEVC encoding is just too taxing on the server unless you have hardware accelerated encoding.