Is High Efficiency Video Coding, HEVC or H.265 as it is also known the Y2K Bug of the fimmaking revolution? Is H.265 the supposed replacement for the H.264 codec a lot of noise, a lot of hype, a lot of attention with the possibly of it never actually doing anything? Quite possibly so.
Before we go anywhere here is a recap of what HEVC is for those not up to speed:
Video thanks to vcodex:
File sizes and royalty issues could be the killer issues surrounding HEVEC.
The common thought is H.265 is on track to produce clips around 50% the bit size of current ones with no loss. Did you know that trials right now are only producing around 30% smaller files? That is it right it means 70% of the clip’s data is retained now before vision takes on qualities different and not wanted to the existing.
Well 30% smaller files are nothing to be laughed at.
The desired 50% figure for Recommendation ITU-T H.265 or ISO/IEC 23008-2 is said to be a few years off still.
So is H.265 either 30% or 50% better than H.264, or the same at 100%? Iain Richardson says maybe it is, with some issues.
Royalty payments:
According to Jan Ozer a streaming media consultant from doceo.com the Elephant or maybe that should be the Codec in the room, is royalties… Just like H.264 had a royalty, HEVC is going to have a royalty. Says Jan.
Now H.264 had a set royalty structure in place from all of the interested parties, making it easy to work out costs, but H.265 has no such royalty rates spelled out.
Reports say that H.265 gives equivalent quality to H.264 at 50% of the data rate, reduces bandwidth costs, and enables higher quality streams and 4K videos. But an H.265 infrastructure must be established, and there is a royalty issue. This session reviews the current state of H.265 – how should it be incorporated into publishing workflows?
Jan Ozer, Principal, Doceo Publishing — USA
Please read more about the future of HEVC H.265 and the codecs royalty issues over at Streaming Media.