What is H.265 - High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) :
Version 1: (April 13, 2013) First approved version of the HEVC/H.265 standard containing Main, Main 10, and Main Still Picture profiles
H.265 - High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is a video compression standard, a successor to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC (Advanced Video Coding), currently under joint development by the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) as ISO/IEC 23008-2 MPEG-H Part 2 and ITU-T H.265. MPEG and VCEG have established a Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) to develop the HEVC standard. HEVC is said to improve video quality, double the data compression ratio compared to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, and can support 8K UHD and resolutions up to 8192×4320
HEVC was designed to substantially improve coding efficiency compared to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC HP, i.e. to reduce bitrate requirements by half with comparable image quality, at the expense of increased computational complexity. Depending on the application requirements HEVC encoders can trade off computational complexity, compression rate, robustness to errors, and encoding delay time.[1] Two of the key features where HEVC was improved compared to H.264/MPEG-4 AVC was support for higher resolution video and improved parallel processing methods.
HEVC is targeted at next-generation HDTV displays and content capture systems which feature progressive scanned frame rates and display resolutions from QVGA (320×240) to 4320p (8192×4320), as well as improved picture quality in terms of noise level, color gamut, and dynamic range.
Im in favor of supporting any new standards that may come out but I can hear the poor Plex Transcoder crying in it's soup once 4K and Ultra become a common standard! LOL
People running Plex on an NAS are already pushing the limits on 1080P but that is not an excuse to limit the Plex system to least common denominator...
Most running Plex on a decent server will not have issues with 4K and Ultra but it will be problematical for those who run it on an NAS or Laptop.
I used VLC player to watch h265 mkv movie it worked fine on my Mac mini. Will plex be upgraded soon?
H265 standard was talked about and release in 2013 and there isn't going to be any hardware for it until 2014! It's going to be a while likely before plex support it.
The transcoder itself would not be the issue at all..,The Hardware running it would be.
Its already an issue for people with low powered NAS devices on 1080P.
Times that by 8 should Ultra be transcoded....
True but some of us have dual SMP quad core Xeon's with hyper threading in our media server. Sure there's not as many of us as there are with low power NAS's but it can't be much work to add the x265 decoder so those of us that do have high powered servers can take advantage of what we got.
As soon as FFMPEG releases a stable version that XBMC uses, I'm sure Plex will get H.265 support. There's not much that Plex has to do other than wait for that since all their decoding/encoding/transcoding is done with ffmpeg.
People running Plex on an NAS are already pushing the limits on 1080P but that is not an excuse to limit the Plex system to least common denominator...
That depends on the NAS. Not all of us running Plex on a NAS are running it on an off-the-shelf consumer NAS. There are a lot of us running unRAID on hardware as powerful as you care (or can afford) to build.
Sure it does. Running 2.1.3 with mpv and it plays x265 just fine.
From the Changelog version 2.1 (October 28, 2013):
- HEVC decoder, raw HEVC demuxer, HEVC demuxing in TS, Matroska and MP4
I stand corrected, I wasn't up to date, thanks!
Now we'll have to what for XBMC to incorporate it. Anyone knows if it's in the pipe for Gotham?
Nope, Gotham is FFMPEG 2.0. There was a discussion about delaying Gotham and moving to 2.1 but that option was decided against due to significant issues with Gotham built using 2.1:
